A nightmare at 6,000 feet.

Clifton Nunnally felt sick before he even saw the seafloor. It was 2017 and he had come down with a virus on a month-long research cruise; he was recuperating in his room to avoid infecting his colleagues at the Louisiana University Marine Consortium (LUMCON). From 6,000 feet below, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) was transmitting a live feed of the site of the Deepwater Horizon accident—the first images of it taken since 2010. Releasing some four million barrels of oil over 87 days, it was the largest accidental marine oil spill ever recorded, a seething, black apocalypse across hundreds of square miles in the Gulf of Mexico.

Nunnally shuffled down to the vessel’s control room to see what the ROV found. In his years as a deep sea biologist, he has learned that disasters like this take a long time to recover from, and that the deep site would likely still be dramatically affected by the spill. “Nothing prepared us for what we saw,” he says: a slick black wasteland, empty of all its usual denizens, such as sea cucumbers and giant isopods. Instead, the area had been taken over by strange crabs and shrimp, either tumor-ridden or eerily languid, as if sleepwalking across the seafloor. The typically white marine snow—detritus that had drifted down from organisms living above—was jet black and clumped up. It was clear that the site was toxic, and maybe irrevocably marred, according to the study the LUMCON team published recently in Royal Society Open Science.

Earlier in the week leading up to the site visit, Nunnally and Craig McClain, the study’s lead author and the executive director of LUMCON, had stopped by several spots in the Gulf of Mexico. They saw mostly what they expected: a bright, light brown, muddy seafloor—typical, healthy conditions for the bottom of this part of the ocean. At the spill site, the control room had grown somber. “One of the very first things that we saw was a solitary boot,” Nunnally says. “That made us realize what we’re looking at here.” The boot was leather and steel-toed, what a worker would have worn while operating BP’s Deepwater Horizon drill rig when it exploded in April 2010, killing 11 workers.

The subsequent cleanup and restoration had cost nearly $65 billion and spotlighted the agony of certain animals, such as pelicans stained brown from oil and turtles caked in sludge. But researchers and the public paid little attention at the time to the harder-to-reach deep dwellers such as isopods and corals, according to Nunnally. “The deep sea is always out of sight, out of mind,” he says. “You can burn off and disperse oil on the surface, but we don’t have the technology to get rid of oil on the seafloor.” So approximately 10 million gallons of it settled there.

In August 2010, four months after the accident, Mark Benfield and Marla Valentine from Louisiana State University and Old Dominion University, respectively, were the first to return to the deep-sea site. They captured video footage using an ROV and found pretty much what one might expect: a seafloor devastated, where carcasses of salps, pyrosomes, and glass sponges seemed to outnumber anything living. Benfield and Valentine documented a staggering decline across species. Mandy Joye, an oceanographer at the University of Georgia, descended to the wellhead inside the HOV Alvin submersible in 2010 and 2014. “In 2010, it was like visiting a graveyard. There were even slimey "webs" at the seabed that looked like cobwebs,” she writes in an email. “[It was the] only time I've been in a submarine along the seabed and found myself sad and dreading what was coming next.” When Joye returned in 2014, she saw the only life that had returned were arthropods, a population that has clearly persisted to this day.

After 2014, most studies of the deep-sea impacts of Deepwater Horizon had ceased, McClain writes in a post on Deep Sea News. In 2015, BP issued a statement claiming that the Gulf was healing itself and “returning to pre-spill conditions,” which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) called “inappropriate as well as premature.” During Joye’s two visits in 2010 and 2014, her ROVs captured soil samples and found that BP’s oil had sprawled across more than 1,200 square miles of seafloor, according to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. BP disagrees with Joye’s findings, and adds that the oil that remains is no longer harmful, according to a 2015 CNN report.

Unsurprisingly, deep-sea biologists are under no such illusions. Though the surface water above the spill site is the same vibrant blue as the rest of the Gulf of Mexico, “the deep sea works on a slower time scale,” Nunnally says. “We know that disasters like this take a long time to recover from.”

McClain and Nunnally were able to return to the spill site in 2017 because they had finished their funded research a few days earlier and had the rare windfall of free time with incredibly expensive oceanographic equipment. They’d been curious about the site for years. “We wanted to know what was going on down there,” Nunnally says. “No one had seen this, and very few images had come up from the seafloor other than the actual spill. This was something we needed to do.”

The LUMCON researchers did their best to replicate Benfield and Valentine’s study to show how the site hand changed in seven years. They surveyed the site surrounding the wreck of the rig, and another one 1,640 feet north. But the video itself seems to tell the story. There were no giant isopods, glass sponges, or whip corals that would have jumped (metaphorically) at the chance to colonize the hard substrate of the rig, such as discarded sections of pipe. The researchers also saw uncomfortably tangible evidence of the humans who lived and worked there: that boot, a door, a work fan, a railing. “There was a couch with a crab on it,” Nunnally says.

In fact, crabs were just about everywhere. The researchers were shocked by the sheer number of crustaceans and other arthropods that had colonized the spill site. According to rough estimates, Atlantic deep sea red crabs, red shrimp, and white caridean shrimp were nearly eight times more populous at the Deepwater site than at other spots in the Gulf. “Everywhere there were crabs just kicking up black plumes of mud, laden with oil,” Nunnally says. But abundance does not mean the site was recovering, or even friendly to life. Particularly eerie was the crab’s achingly slow movement. “Normally, they scatter when they see the ROV lights,” he says. But these crabs seemed unbothered, or unaware of the robot’s presence.

The researchers hypothesize that degrading hydrocarbons are what’s luring unwitting crabs from the surrounding seafloor to the deep-sea equivalent of a toxic dump. “The chemical makeup of oil is similar to the oils naturally present on crustaceans,” Nunnally says. “They’re attracted to the oil site, but everything goes downhill for them once they’re in the area.” A similar kind of chemical confusion occurred at an oil spill in Buzzards Bay in New England in 2003, which attracted hordes of American lobsters. The researchers liken the death trap to the La Brea Tar Pits: Once lured in, the crabs lose their ability to leave. With no other species able to thrive in the area, the crabs have no food source—except each other. And as one might imagine, consuming the flesh of a toxin-riddled crab or starving to death in a deep-sea tar pit is sort of a lose/lose situation.

The crabs also looked anything but normal: some claws shrunken, some swollen, shriveled legs, a dusting of parasites. “There were deformities, but mostly things were missing,” Nunnally says. “You come in with eight legs and try to get away on four or five.” The researchers have yet to ascertain what specific toxins led to these maladies. The shrimp looked just as awful as the crabs. “They didn’t look like shrimp from other sites,” Nunnally says, adding that many of the small crustaceans had humps in their backs—tumors, perhaps.

The researchers were unable to capture a specimen in this visit, but they now hope to secure funding to return, or find another free day at sea. Normally, specimen capture is conducted with a baited trap, but these sick crustaceans seem uninterested in moving toward anything, even prey, Nunnally says. The other option is to use a specialized ROV, but that’s trickier.

Nunnally hopes their study leads to more attention to the devastation on the seafloor, as well as better baseline studies of deep-sea sites before they’re opened to drilling. As a grad student in 2004, he had actually worked on the initial survey of the Deepwater Horizon site. “The time between that initial exploration to the first major oil spill was only six years,” he says, adding that he sees new rigs every time he g0es out on a research cruise. “This is something that is not going to go away soon.”

One of the last things the ROV spotted was the memorial wellhead that marks the site of the spill itself, where oil gushed out from the broken drill pipe in multiple places. On November 8, 2010, the lemon-yellow concrete cap was secured on it. Back then, it was easy to read the words emblazoned in black on either side of it: “IN MEMORY OF THE DEEP WATER HORIZON 11,” along with 11 stars. Now, splotched over in nine years of ambient floating oil, it’s harder to make out.

Something like a koala, except the size of a rhino.

Thousands of years ago, the inland region of eastern Australia was a far cry from the sere place it is today. During the Ice Age, this part of the Southern Hemisphere hosted its own array of big charismatic creatures—answers to the woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats up north—some of which roamed the then-forested regions of Queensland and Victoria. In a country famous today for its curious and sometimes venomous fauna, Australia’s prehistoric menagerie has proven just as weird, if not weirder, according to a new paper in the journal PLOS One.

“These were strange beasts unlike anything we see today,” says Julien Louys, a paleontologist at Griffith University, who reviewed the study. “The closest [relatives] would probably be wombats and koalas, but that’s a little like saying that a sheep is comparable to a giraffe.”

The research, involving Monash University and Museums Victoria, reveals an obscure family of extinct mega-marsupials called Palorchestidae. First identified among thousands of other bones in rich Ice Age menagerie of Victoria Fossil Cave, these creatures lived during the Miocene and Pleistocene periods (recently, as deep time goes). In describing the animals, different researchers compared the palorchestids to wombats, echidnas, tapirs, even the long-extinct giant ground sloth. They’re a little hard to picture.

“They were pouched mammals with a long pointed face, extensible tongue, and tiny eyes,” says Hazel Richards, a doctoral student at Monash University studying marsupial evolution, and lead author of the paper. “Their bodies were front-loaded, with hugely muscled forelimbs and comparatively slender hindquarters, with robust hands and feet equipped with sharp, hooked claws bigger than a grizzly bear's.”

Matthew McCurry, the paleontology curator at the Australian Museum, says that “some of the weirdest features” of the animals were their forelimbs. The elbows of Palorchestes azael, the largest of the three extinct marsupials examined in the study, were locked at an obtuse angle at all times, as if reaching out for a handshake, relegating arm flexibility to the animal’s shoulders, and providing some information about how the animal moved and accessed food.

It sounds a bit like putting together mismatched parts, but it amounts to something like an anteater or tapir, except out of balance—burly in front and sleek in the back—and much, much larger. Some palorchestids weighed over a ton, but in spite of their massive size, Richards speculates that some of them weren’t ground-bound.

“We suspect they were more likely to be using their claws to cling to tree trunks and use powerful shoulder muscles to pull themselves up,” says Richards, “so they could get their long tongue and nipping incisors closer to foliage higher up off the ground.” Watch out below.

Plus Bonnie’s poetry, wanted posters, and a bloodied bandage.

On April 13, 1933, five sheriffs assembled outside 3347 ½ Oakridge Drive in Joplin, Missouri to confront what they thought were bootleggers operating out of the garage apartment. Instead, they encountered the notorious outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who had converted the garage into a temporary hideout for the Barrow Gang. In the shootout that followed, Bonnie, Clyde, and their associates killed a detective and a constable.

They managed to escape, but left behind almost everything they owned at the time: Bonnie’s poems, a bevy of weapons, and several rolls of undeveloped film that held staged photos of the two, nattily dressed and pointing various weapons at each other. In the coming weeks, national tabloids ran wild with these photos, which formally established the myth of Bonnie and Clyde as star-crossed lovers on the run. The couple would be killed a year later.

One of the firearms captured at the Joplin house, a Western Field Browning Model 30 shotgun, heads to auction this Friday at RR Auction in Boston, along with several wanted posters and various items recovered in Joplin, including Bonnie’s poems and a bloodied bandage from another associate in the Barrow Gang. “The Joplin shootout propelled Bonnie and Clyde into the national eye,” says Karen Blumenthal, author of Bonnie and Clyde: The Making of a Legend. “They became this symbol of undying love, a love that transcends all difficulties.”

From 1932 to 1934, Bonnie and Clyde made headlines and (mostly) eluded authorities during their spree of bank-robbing, kidnapping, and murder across the South and Midwest. They were two of the most famous Depression-era outlaws, and they emerged at a time when people were distrustful of banks and authority, Blumenthal says. Both came from poverty. Although the two clearly romanticized themselves, they were responsible for the murders of as many as 13 people.

Bonnie and Clyde had unusually powerful firearms that helped them evade capture for so long. The Barrow Gang made a habit of robbing National Guard armories and stealing boatloads of automatic rifles and shotguns, Blumenthal says. The service revolvers of local sheriffs were no match for military-grade guns. “They had weapons of war and the police had handguns,” she says. “Plus, Clyde was very good at stealing very fast cars.”

But life on the road was far from romantic, as the two were always on the run and functionally lived out of their car. “It was a terrible existence,” Blumenthal says. Seven months before her capture, Bonnie was crippled in a car accident that covered her leg in battery acid. “For the last seven months of her life, she had to hop,” says Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of RR Auctions.

Bonnie and Clyde’s penchant for wholesale gun theft has resulted in a great number of guns that collectors say are associated with the Barrow Gang, according to Livingston. “There are just dozens and dozens of them,” he says. It’s often difficult to authenticate these claims, meaning that RR Auction frequently turns down weapons that don’t offer enough proof of their association with the outlaws.

But the shotgun for auction this Friday is another story. Livingston says that the Barrow Gang used the Western Field Browning 12 gauge shotgun in the shootout, meaning it might have killed the two officers slain on the scene. He says that after Bonnie and Clyde fled the shootout, Detective Tom DeGraff found the shotgun in the Joplin garage, and took it home as a souvenir. When he registered it under the National Firearms Act in 1946, he included an affidavit noting its origins. What’s more, the same shotgun can be spotted in images printed from the film rolls left behind at Joplin. In one photograph, it leans against one of the Barrow Gang’s cars. “It’s spectacular, unimpeachable provenance!” Livingston says.

In 2012, RR Auction sold several of Clyde’s guns for hundreds of thousands of dollars, including a 1911 Army Colt 45 Pistol for $240,000. This pistol was perhaps the most famous of Barrow-associated guns, removed from Clyde’s waistband after the duo was gunned down by Texas and Louisiana lawmen in 1934. Frank Hamer, the leader of the ambush that killed Bonnie and Clyde, kept it as a trophy.

“At the time, Bonnie and Clyde were like reality TV entertainment,” Blumenthal says. “But the idea that these really bad people who were tied to a dozen murders would be glorified today is mind-boggling.” She attributes much of their modern mythology to the 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the lovesick outlaws. Livingston chalks up some of this fame to the lovers’ undeniable charisma. “He played the saxophone, and she wrote poetry,” he says. “The myth became these two young kids living a glamorous life, blazing a trail of freedom and lawlessness and the exhilaration of feeling indestructible, even knowing they were going to die.”

If you can’t afford to buy a famed firearm for yourself, you can ogle some of the couple’s guns and other memorabilia at the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum in Gibsland, Louisiana. It’s housed in a cafe alleged to be the last place the duo visited before their death. It is said that they ordered sandwiches to go.

The author had a love-hate relationship with his hometown.

Kurt Vonnegut’s typewriter, Pall Malls, and Purple Heart are boxed and ready to move. Julia Whitehead, founder and CEO of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, and her team have been keeping these and other artifacts safe while working from cafes, home offices, and a small pop-up shop at the Circle Center Mall. The museum honoring the author’s legacy has spent this year living in limbo, awaiting funding for relocation to a permanent building in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Whitehead conceived the idea for a Vonnegut museum in November of 2008, a year and a half after the author’s death. The physical museum opened in a donated storefront in 2011, displaying items donated by friends or on loan from the Vonnegut family, but has been homeless since January 2019. Charging through a fundraising campaign this spring, the determined grassroots organization recently announced it has secured $1.5 million in donations and will move forward with the purchase of a new building for the museum on Indiana Avenue.

Although Vonnegut left Indianapolis after the Second World War and spent his professional life on the East Coast, Vonnegut’s hometown is the perfect place for the museum. “It should be here because this is the need,” explains Whitehead from a corner of the new space where mocked-up exhibits precede necessary renovations. Planned offerings include Vonnegut’s writing studio, a "Freedom of Expression" exhibit detailing his support of First Amendment rights, and the Slaughterhouse Five exhibit, which will open in November (for Veteran's Day and Vonnegut's Birthday). Outside there will be a jazz exhibit, showcasing how the jazz musicians of Indiana Avenue—where the museum is located—impacted Vonnegut. “He is recognized as someone who represents [Indiana] well, someone we can emulate, someone who valued his life growing up here … He thought that his upbringing here in Indianapolis was unique and was special.”

In 1922 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born into wealth and privilege in the Midwestern town. With German roots of Freethinkers and artists, Vonnegut was a fourth-generation Hoosier. His mother was born into the aristocratic Lieber family, owners of the successful Indianapolis Brewing Company. His great-grandfather opened Vonnegut Hardware in 1852, serving Indianapolis for over a century. His father and grandfather, both architects, built many of the city’s landmarks.

Prohibition and the Great Depression devastated the Vonnegut family, but young Kurt didn’t seem to notice. He transferred into the public school system and thrived. He attended Shortridge High School, one of the country’s most distinguished public high schools at the time, and the only one with a daily newspaper. Vonnegut was a contributor and editor of The Echo, along with Madelyn Pugh, who would later become head writer for the I Love Lucy show.

Dan Wakefield, another famed Indianapolis author and longtime friend of Vonnegut is also a Shortridge alum, 10 years Kurt’s junior. When they met in 1963, the year Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle was published,Wakefield was already a fan. In a recent discussion, Wakefield was quick to point out that although they were both working authors at the time, they didn’t talk about any of that. “No, we talked about high school, in fact we always talked about Shortridge somehow.”

Vonnegut’s childhood and adolescence in Indianapolis had a lasting impact on him. In his 1996 graduation speech to Butler University graduates, Vonnegut reminisced, “If I had to do it all over, I would choose to be born again in a hospital in Indianapolis. I would choose to spend my childhood again at 4365 North Illinois Street, about 10 blocks from here, and to again be a product of that city’s public schools.”

After Shortridge, Vonnegut briefly attended Cornell University before enlisting in the army in 1943. His mother, suffering from depression and subsequent addiction to prescription medication, died by suicide in 1944 over Mother’s Day weekend, just before Kurt shipped out to Europe. During the Battle of the Bulge he was captured by the Germans and taken to Dresden. It was in the safety of an underground slaughterhouse that Vonnegut would miraculously survive the Allied bombings that destroyed the city. He came home with a Purple Heart.

Vonnegut went on to the University of Chicago, followed opportunity East, and eventually settled on Cape Cod with his growing family. His mother “always wanted to live on Cape Cod,” Vonnegut told an interviewer in 1977. “It’s probably very common for sons to try to make their mothers’ impossible dreams come true.” In a 1947 letter to his father Vonnegut offered, “Maybe we’ll come back some day—but not now. I think we’ll do a more honest job of living away from what will always be home.”

Dresden continued to plague Vonnegut as he tried discerning the tragedy on paper. It took many years to finally write about his war experience. He published Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children’s Crusade: a Duty-Dance with Death in 1969, in the midst of the Vietnam War. Many embraced the book, but others banned it and burned it.

This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the novel that hurled Vonnegut into fame. The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library is observing the golden jubilee with an unprecedented book giveaway, offering every sophomore in Vonnegut’s home state a free copy of Slaughterhouse Five. Writer, historian, and Indianapolis native Gregory Sumner suggests that the true hero of Slaughterhouse Five is not Billy Pilgrim, the main character who spends the pages “unstuck in time,” but Edgar Derby, a middle-aged Indianapolis school teacher also imprisoned by the Germans in Dresden. “He emerges as the leader of the group because he is such a decent person…[he] represents the values of decency, moderation and kindness,” says Sumner. “I would call these Indianapolis values.”

Vonnegut wrote over a dozen novels and many short stories and articles in his life. Indianapolis is represented in many of his works, sometimes under the moniker Midland City. Sumner believes that Vonnegut’s views on his hometown were complex and evolved over time. Vonnegut loved his home and at times hated it, but eventually reconciled with it. In 2007, coincidentally the year of his death at 84, Indianapolis celebrated the Year of Vonnegut, finally paying tribute to its native son. In 2011 he was immortalized in a larger-than-life mural that watches over the streets he stomped as a child. Fellow banned book author and Vonnegut fan, Salman Rushdie, recently spoke at the Night of Vonnegut event. “Death is a great career move,” he joked, poking fun at the city’s timing to embrace Vonnegut as a hometown hero.

Vonnegut was surely stung by rejection, but his heart remained in Indianapolis, once stating, “Indianapolis is what people love about me.” In a 1973 interview with Playboy magazine, Vonnegut was asked if he considered himself a radical. “No,” he answered bluntly, “because everything I believe I was taught in junior civics during the Great Depression—at School 43 in Indianapolis, with full approval of the school board. School 43 wasn’t a radical school. America was an idealistic, pacifist nation at that time.”

The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library will open for a sneak preview in time for the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, which begins on September 22. (Within the museum, this event is referred to as Freedom to Read Week. "Freedom to Read Week and Banned Books Week are one and the same," the museum website reads, "but some folks thought we were celebrating the banning of books!")

Ultimately, Whitehead wants the museum to be something Kurt would love. Vonnegut “always wanted the best for Indianapolis and tried to vocalize that,” she says. “He always wanted Indianapolis to be more progressive, more inclusive and [for] organizations like public schools and public libraries to be well funded, partly because he had such a great experience here.”

A tiny group of scholars added 500 words and made 5,000 revisions to the Dictionary of the Irish Language.

For the past five years, Sharon Arbuthnot has been on the hunt for new words. She isn’t searching in the places one might expect linguistic invention, such as far corners of the internet or the text messages of teenagers. Arbuthnot, a scholar of early and medieval Irish at Queen’s University Belfast, is more interested in forgotten words, ones invented over a thousand years ago that have become lost to modern scholars and dictionaries. So she spends her days poring over delicately inked manuscripts written in medieval Irish, scanning for an arrangement of letters that seems somehow new—a difficult thing for a language that’s well over a thousand years old. “It’s quite a lonely job,” she says with a laugh. “But I guess it’s what I do.”

Arbuthnot and researchers from the University of Cambridge have just completed the monumental, sprawling project of revising the Dictionary of the Irish Language, which was first published by the Royal Irish Academy in the first half of the 20th century. Over the past five years, they identified 500 words lost from dictionaries for centuries, made around 5,000 revisions to current definitions, and debunked several words that turned out to be fake or erroneously defined. The dictionary, which was digitized in 2007 by scholars at the University of Ulster, spans around a thousand years, from about 700 to 1700. Their research is funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Updating the lexicon of a thousand-year-old language may seem like a foolish task for anyone living in the 21st century. But understanding the words medieval people used offers insight into the lives they lived—how they behaved, what they believed, and how they saw the world, says Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, a medievalist at Cambridge, who worked with Arbuthnot, in a press release.

To maximize their chances of discovering new words, the researchers focused on less-studied, and often less savory, manuscripts. This meant shelving popular stories and poems and diving into legal texts and medical tomes. Some texts, by their very nature, are less useful for the job. “You don’t get much vocabulary from genealogies,” Arbuthnot says.

Accordingly, the rediscovered words shed light on a less romantic part of medieval Irish culture. “We found a whole series words on pus, and oozing pus,” she says. “They’re quite nice.” The most common of these words, brachaid, means to ooze pus. The researchers found most examples of brachaid in relation to wounds that happened to be oozing pus, and cleaning wounds that oozed pus.

A similarly gross word the researchers discovered was béochlaid, which means to “rub with grease and fat.” Béochlaid first appeared in a 14th-century passage on how to care for a newborn baby, stressing that people should be careful not to lose anything in the baby’s ears as it is being washed and rubbed with grease.

These words may seems strangely specific now, but might have been quite common in medieval Ireland. Bánbiad translates into “white food,” and was used commonly to refer to dairy products. Slinnénacht refers to the particular practice of divination done with the shoulder-blade of an animal, and appeared around the 1600s in a text describing a host of supernatural processes, including néladóirecht (cloud-divination) and dernatóracht (palmistry). Another oddly precise and once-useful term, ól Pátraic, which translates into “St. Patrick’s measure,” refers to the amount of liquid that could feasibly fill 1,728 eggshells.

Arbuthnot sees medieval Irish as a “beautifully transparent” language. For example, the word for mousetrap translates into “wooden cat.” She also rediscovered the medieval Irish word for placenta, bratt boinne, which translates into “a cloak” or “covering” relating to a female. “It’s a lovely sort of phrase,” she says.

Medieval Irish, like many other languages at the time, was written in scriptio continua, a style of writing without spaces. In other words, the manuscripts contain long strings of text without any division, with words written continuously into each other. “Sometimes you’ll find the rare large capital letter, but really it’s just continuous running text,” Arbuthnot says. “Once you’ve lost your way, it’s hard to get back on again.”

This lack of demarcation between words has resulted in what Arbuthnot calls ghost words, or fake words. “Ghost words come from early editors thinking they recognize a new, strange cluster of letters, which they put in the dictionary,” she says, adding that such words often turn out to be two individual existing words that are quite straightforward. One ghost word stricken from the latest update is tapairis, which past translators believed to be an unknown medicinal substance but actually arose from two words that mean “grains of paradise,” a spice related to cardamom.

This means, of course, that any seemingly new word is put to a rigorous test before an official addition to the dictionary. “There are always combinations of letters that don’t look quite right, or are not obviously related to any word,” Arbuthnot says. “To avoid the danger of introducing ghost words, we hold them back for a while in a database.” The researchers currently have around 20 of these maybe-words—or, as Arbuthnot notes, “maybe-not words”—awaiting their fate as either something rare and newly uncovered, or simply an odd cluster of letters that represent the medieval equivalent of a typo. “Scribes made mistakes,” she says. “And their errors have a tendency to take on a life of their own.”

Though she hardly thinks that any of the 500 words will enter modern use, Arbuthnot hopes that people will use the dictionary to gain a fuller understanding of medieval Ireland. She was loath to mention that the revision updated the entry on leprechauns: When media outlets latch on to this popularly Irish detail, Arbuthnot feels it diminishes the dictionary’s work. “There are things that make us Irish aside from what the outside world sees as Ireland,” she says, referring to a phenomenon she calls “leprechaun sensationalism.”

It takes a particular kind of person to revise a bygone dictionary. The job’s main requirement is a sprawling, extensive knowledge of a vocabulary that’s fallen out of use. “It’s quite a demanding job,” Arbuthnot says. When she first started out around 10 years ago, she would look up every third word she found. “It’s definitely gotten easier as the years have gone on, but you could still spend a lifetime and be misled.” Her only full-time coworker works in Cambridge, England, so she spends much of her day alone, trawling through scans of yellowed vellum on a solitary screen. Sometimes, they’ll discover examples of the same new word, which she says strengthens the trustworthiness of their dictionary.

Arbuthnot has no intention of stopping her linguistic detective work. She hopes to release another 5,000 corrections in the next five years. Despite the stops and starts, there’s nothing like the thrill of discovery. “For a day or two, you know you’re the only person living that knows this word exists,” she says. “Anyone who spends any time with Old Irish is trapped on this feeling.”

From Kushites to Christians, an old site in Sudan has new stories to tell.

Anwar Mahajoub grew up in the village of El-Kurru, Sudan, along the Nile between its Third and Fourth Cataracts. Besides at its delta, which offers a flourish of emerald where the river meets the Mediterranean Sea, the Nile is almost entirely bordered by just a thin band of foliage, beyond which are the sepia sands of the Sahara. For centuries, the desert has obscured and protected the tombs of kings, riverside temples, even entire ancient cities. Mahajoub grew up next to one of these sites, so it was never obscured to him. Recent excavations there have made the tombs and world of ancient Nubia—specifically the Kingdom of Kush that ruled over it for hundreds of years—feel even closer.

“Since I grew up in the vicinity of [El-Kurru], the work in the archaeological site itself makes me feel closer not just to the past of childhood, but to the ancient past,” he says.

Recently, Mahajoub has offered his local knowledge to researchers from the University of Michigan on the International Kurru Archaeological Project, which has conducted some of the most extensive work there since the site was first excavated a century ago by American archaeologist George Reisner. El-Kurru consists of pyramid tombs from the seventh and eighth centuries B.C., as well as a pyramid and rock-cut temple built a few hundred years later. On those later structures, the team has documented nearly 1,000 individual carved graffiti spanning hundreds of years—some ancient Kushite, some more recent Christian, and all made as a form of worship.

“The more I know the historical facts about the site,” Mahajoub says, “the more I get attached to it.”

Some of the graffiti are merely scratched into the stone, while others are more sophisticated, almost like bas-relief. Many depict animals, means of transportation, and overt religious symbols. Some of the most common are merely gouged holes, which the archaeologists speculate were made to grind the temple’s stone and ingest it for spiritual and medicinal purposes.

“It could be that it was just easy to do, and you were making a sign that you were there,” says Suzanne Davis, head of conservation at the University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum, “but there are also beliefs now in Sudan and parts of Egypt that if you consume part of the stone from an ancient, powerful monument, that it well help you.” As for the images, they would not have been easy to make, which, according to Geoff Emberling, an archaeologist with the University of Michigan who supervised the excavations, makes them all the more significant.

“Ancient images were carved and viewed in an environment where there were many fewer images than we’re used to seeing,” he says. “They were potent in part due to their scarcity.”

The earliest of the graffiti are carved on the temple, date to around the time it was built, in the fourth century B.C., and depicted Egyptian and Kushite motifs. The later Christian works were carved into the other structure, the pyramid, by pilgrims during the early medieval period, around the 9th or 10th centuries, near the time when the structure collapsed, centuries after the decline of the Kingdom.

In ancient Kush, Emberling says, an image of something—archers, giraffes, and vipers, symbols of the underworld—could invoke its presence, “a magical quality.” Some of the older images bear a resemblance to Egyptian gods and folklore, since the Egyptians once conquered Kush (and later, Kush conquered Egypt right back). The Christian iconography offers clear interpretations: numerous boats (which may indicate how the pilgrims arrived) and monograms that stand for certain saints and other Christian figures. Following the collapse of the Kushite empire in the fourth century, local kings had adopted Christianity. The Christian symbols then may have been learned from missionaries from the north. In any case, Emberling says, the fact that both traditions are present at a single place helps clarify the importance and history of the site.

Vast temple complexes and burial grounds like these typically are windows into the lives and deaths of the rich and powerful; the El-Kurru graffiti, on the other hand, reveals something about everyone else, including how they expressed their beliefs.

“Not only are these marks of a mobile population, a cattle culture,” says Emberling, “but they’re also the direct testimony of people who are not the elite.”

Photographs of the etchings are on view at the University of Michigan’s Kelsey School of Archaeology through March 2020. Davis hopes the exhibition shows visitors—almost all of whom will never visit El-Kurru—a different side of a civilization that thrived for hundreds of years.“If you look at what other museums have in their galleries from Kush, you’ll see really fancy things that belonged to kings,” she says. “It would be like learning everything about the United Kingdom from what’s inside Buckingham Palace.”

El-Kurru is far, far from Ann Arbor, but this increasingly complex story of ancient Kush is being told there as well.

“I am excited about the visitor center, which the team is working to establish in my village,” says Mahajoub. “It will provide a broader understanding of the site for the visitors, the local heritage of the village, and will help in the development of the village.”

Bottle masala is impossible to find in stores.

First came the burning eyes. Then the uncontrollable sneezing.

I was seven years old and watching three sari-clad ladies, each holding a tall, wooden pestle, adroitly throw their sticks into the center of a deep wooden vat. It was filled with dried chilies, which explained the pungent aroma in the air. Thump-thump-thump. The ladies’ synchronized pounding created a hypnotic beat.

What I witnessed that summer day in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, was the annual tradition of hand-making bottle masala—a fragrant, reddish-brown spice blend named for the darkly colored bottles it’s stored in. Crafted from 20 to more than 30 ingredients, the one-of-a-kind mix is synonymous with the East Indian community—descendants of people indigenous to the North Konkan region on India’s west coast who converted to Christianity. This minority was officially recognized as “East Indians” by the government in 1887.

“When the British took over Bombay, the city’s native Catholic population took up the moniker East Indian to differentiate us from the other Christians who had moved to the city,” explains Reena Pereira-Almeida, creator of the East India Memory Co., a project that documents the group’s history and culture. “Over time, our cuisine, language, clothing, music, etc. came to reflect a mixture of Maharashtrian, Portuguese, and British influences.”

The rusty-hued bottle masala exemplifies this unique amalgamation. Chef Michael Swamy traces its origins back to goda masala, a roughly 20-ingredient mélange made by Maharashtrians using the same hand-pounding procedure that so enthralled my younger self. “Dry blending of spices is a very Maharashtrian thing,” he says.

But this artisanal practice is slowly dwindling. Few families have the space for hired masalawaalis to pound out bottle masala now that Mumbai is a megacity. Instead, they are choosing the convenience of having their mixes made in mills, and some households have filed away their family recipe, reducing the wild, family-by-family diversity of masalas out there. Still, for East Indian home cooks, bottle masala remains at the heart of their kitchen’s spice collection.

“It has an earthy, smoky flavor—very subtle,” says Verna Texeira, a Brooklyn resident who was raised in Bombay. “It’s also very versatile—used with meat, vegetables, or fish—and changes the taste of the dish according to what you are cooking.” In The East Indian Cookery Book, first published in 1981 by The Bombay East Indian Association, bottle masala is listed in 34 recipes, including dishes such as duck moile and prawn lonvas, which are celebrated within the community. It’s also the first recipe in Swamy’s tome, The East Indian Kitchen, in which he shares two versions of the blend.

“East Indian food is a mish-mash,” says Swamy. “You have the Indian side, which is very pure and holistic and includes no meat. Then the Portuguese came and introduced meat eating, like pork, and even bread.”

Sarpatel, made with cubed pork and bottle masala, perfectly represents this fusion. Due to the limited availability of the community’s spice blends, though, and scarcity of East Indian restaurants, the cuisine is a mystery to most of Mumbai. Swamy partly blames its underrepresentation on anecdotal evidence that East Indians are “secretive” and notorious for guarding their recipes.

“I got a lot of whiplash from my aunts for sharing our recipes publicly in my book,” he says. Verna’s mother, Georgina Texeira, admits she’s possessive about the bottle masala recipe she inherited from her grandmother. “I have shared it only with close family and friends,” she says.

This helps make bottle masala, and East Indian cuisine, special: Each family’s recipe differs depending on the area and sub-group they belong to. “The taste and color of the bottle masala will be different for each home and from village to village,” explains my father, who grew up in the former East Indian stronghold of Mumbai’s Pali Village. Some families use a combination of chilies. Others favor the Kashmiri chili, which lends the mix its trademark maroon hue. Common additions include turmeric, black peppercorns, fenugreek seeds, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, wheat, nutmeg, cumin, mugwort … the list goes on.

Like my father, Texeira remembers the masalawaalis going house to house in her hamlet of Kalina to register families interested in having bottle masala or other spice blends made during the warm summer months. She also looked forward to the impending visit from the masalawallah (spice man). Like Santa Claus, he carried a large bag and delivered the pylee—all the spices each family required.

While this home-delivery service no longer exists, Texeira and others visit Mumbai’s larger markets to procure ingredients. Verna, whose mother has been making bottle masala for 30 years, fondly remembers this annual shopping spree and the two- or three-day process of sun drying the spices.

“All the verandahs in the village would have the spices laid out on bedsheets or steel thalis,” she explains. “In the afternoons, my mother would send me to the terrace upstairs to turn the chilies in the sun. It was such a beautiful, sensory experience seeing the yellow turmeric, the round coriander seeds, the red crinkled chilies … ”

Marise Ann Lawrence likens the atmosphere of the masalawaallis’ arrival to a party. As the spice ladies removed the denkhas (stalks) from the chilies, or tossed ingredients in an earthenware dish over a wood fire, they’d chat with her aunts and mother and exchange family stories. “It wasn’t just about the work,” she says.

Depending on the quantity made, the procedure could take a day or a whole week. “It was like a picnic,” adds Texeira. “You’d have to provide them with tea, sugar, milk, and oil, and in the afternoon, they would cook their meal.” My father remembers the spice ladies preparing a dish with dried Bombay ducks, a fish found in the Arabian Sea, which they would char in the wood fire’s embers and smash together with raw onion to make a chutney.

Just as larger families band together for masala-making season, East Indians, as a minority group, unite for community celebrations, religious feasts, and weddings, says Pereira-Almeida, who grew up in India and now lives in Australia. “Those who have settled in other countries come together for occasions like Christmas and Easter,” she adds, referencing the sizeable East Indian diaspora. And traditional East Indian specialties, including those made with bottle masala, always play a starring role at these events.

Once the toasted spices cooled, the masalawaalis would start hand pounding. Standing around a chalice-like okhli—built into the floors of homes in some villages—they established their catchy rhythm, taking turns slamming the spices. “It is pound, sift, repeat. Pound, sift, repeat,” says Lawrence of the three- to four-hour operation.

“I remember their bangles clinking as they worked,” says Verna. Decades later, she remains fascinated by the ladies’ strength.

As mounds of vibrantly colored spices piled up, the masalawaalis gently combined the powders with deft circular hand movements. They then filled narrow-necked beer or whiskey bottles, patiently pushing down the masala with a wooden stick and sealing it with a cork and piece of cloth secured with string.

While many East Indians are nostalgic about the hand-pounding process, most find that making bottle masala—including sourcing and roasting the spices—is too much work, even though the mills have sped up the job. Still, a stubborn few do it themselves to ensure quality, and Swamy believes the traditional method releases the spices’ essential oils slowly, giving the blend a mellow flavor, while mechanical methods leave a slightly bitter aftertaste.

The old-school procedure may soon be relegated to memories, but the love affair with bottle masala continues for this community dispersed around the world. “Other communities say everything we cook is always with bottle masala, that we can’t survive without it,” says Texeira. It’s not much of an exaggeration: On her yearly visits to see Verna in Brooklyn, she always has a packet or two of bottle masala stashed in her suitcase.

“If I call my Mom and ask her what to do if I’m stuck with adding flavor to a dish, she will say just put bottle masala,” says Verna, laughing.

They’re older than Christ and as high as the heavens.

Giant sequoias are no strangers to history. The trees can last thousands of years, and at least one tree was already half a century old at the time of the Trojan War. But that’s if they’re uninterrupted by environmental devastation and human activity, two hazards that often go hand in hand. The environmental threats of drought and fire vex most of the Sierra Nevada’s forests, including groves of giant sequoias.

Now, a California conservation group is beseeching the public to step up and fund the purchase of a huge grove of the towering trees. “It’s an awe-inspiring place,” says Jessica Inwood, Parks Program Manager for the Save the Redwoods League. “It’s the last, largest giant sequoia property left in private ownership.” One sequoia on the property, the Stagg Tree, is believed to be the fifth-largest tree in the world.

Alder Creek, a 530-acre property in California’s southern Sierra Nevada, has been the property of the Rouch family since before World War II, according to The Mercury News. The league recently signed a purchase agreement with the family, and is seeking $15 million from the public to acquire the land and the giant sequoias on it, nearly 500 of which have a diameter of six feet or more.

Though the sequoias do not burn as frequently as other trees in Californias, the league intends to reduce tree overgrowth in order to mitigate the damage of future fires. “With fire frequency and intensity predicted to increase due to climate change and with significant fuels accumulation in the forest, the ecosystem is vulnerable to severe fire damage,” Inwood says.

The fires are nothing new, but the warm conditions that foster them are becoming more frequent, and the vast fires that result are difficult to combat. “Drought in a warmer climate is a big threat,” says Roger Bales, director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at the University of California Merced. “Also high-intensity wildfire, which is more likely with a warmer climate.”

According to Bales’ research, the sequoia grove at Alder Creek is in the middle range of vulnerability. “The groves made it through the recent four-year drought,” he says, referring to a California dry spell that killed over 100 million trees, “but some might not in a longer drought.”

If the Save the Redwoods League manages to buy the forest at Alder Creek, nearly all of California’s giant sequoia groves will ultimately end up on protected land. The league plans to transfer the land to the US Forest Service in the next decade, which will make it part of the Giant Sequoia National Monument.

A fantasy author's 37-year-old cache may soon be unearthed in one of the city's 220 parks. But which one?

In 1982, children’s book author Byron Preiss published The Secret, about a mythical treasure and its guardians—magical creatures hidden from human view. The enchanted beings—including Mugwumps, Devil Dogs, and Tinkerbelles—were a figment of Preiss’s imagination.

But the treasure was not. Before the book’s release, the writer concealed 12 ceramic keys in hand-painted casques, then buried them in public parks around the U.S. Each key could be returned to Preiss in exchange for precious jewels, collectively worth around $10,000.

But Preiss’s treasure hunt had a problem: The treasure was too well hidden. Seekers found it nearly impossible to unravel the rhyming riddles and elaborate paintings that mapped the location of the casques. In 37 years only two have been found. No one knows exactly where the remaining casques are buried—or if they still remain, nearly four decades later, in their original hiding places.

But general consensus suggests one thing is true: Preiss hid one of his casques somewhere in the 220 public parks of San Francisco. To preserve the game’s integrity, Preiss told no one the whereabouts of the buried casques—including city officials.

So when the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department received an email request to dig for buried treasure in Golden Gate Park, in January 2018, it was the agency’s first introduction to The Secret. Charmed by the story, “we decided to lean in,” says Phil Ginsburg, general manager of SF Rec and Park. “In a big city, we have serious problems. Digging a few holes is not one of them.”

Within a month the department had created a new program, the Treasure Rangers, to allow treasure hunters to dig while ensuring that irrigation lines and flower beds would remain undamaged. Acting as both wizened guides and environmental protectors, the Treasure Rangers are San Francisco’s contribution to Preiss’s imaginary world.

“Our goal is to protect and steward our park system,” says Ginsburg, “but also to be its ambassadors—to facilitate joy and whimsy and fantasy.”

Selected from the ranks of the city’s park rangers and gardening staff, Treasure Rangers are assigned to treasure hunters for an hour at a time. If searchers come up empty-handed after 60 minutes, they have to apply for a new permit. (If you want to search Golden Gate Park for hidden treasure, you have to use this Secret Treasure Hunt Dig Request form.) Less than two years after launching the program, Rec and Park has already fielded more than 100 treasure-hunting requests.

“We’ve had treasure hunters ranging in age from 20 to 60,” says Treasure Ranger Marcus Santiago. “Some like to talk and let us know how they picked [a] particular spot. Some just dig until their time is up.”

So far, though, the casque remains elusive. And Preiss, the only person to know its exact location, isn’t talking: He was killed in a car accident in 2005.

The ongoing legacy of The Secret, in San Francisco and around the country, began amid a wave of “armchair treasure hunts”—complex puzzles that led to actual hidden prizes—in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The 32-page picture book Masquerade, by Kit Williams, is generally considered the first of the genre, guiding readers to locate an 18-carat rabbit pendant hidden in Bedfordshire, England’s Ampthill Park.

Inspired by Williams, Preiss wrote a tale that pitted nature, in all its goodness and purity, against the brutality of human civilization. Two National Lampoon editors, Sean Kelly and Ted Mann, were hired to contribute to the story.

In it, the Fair People—a race of fantastical, nature-dwelling beings threatened by the growing empire of Man—escape the Old World for the New. When Man, too, crosses the sea to North America, the Fair People go into hiding, along with their most precious treasure: “wonderstones” concealed in casques. They eventually offer Man “a simple truce”: If humans can find the casques, the treasure will be theirs. In exchange, Man will allow the Fair People to emerge from hiding and live peacefully in the human world.

It’s not without trying that humans have failed to keep up their end of the bargain. Within months of the book’s release, Preiss had received 700 letters from treasure hunters claiming to have identified the location of a casque. None, apparently, actually did. But the next year, in 1983, three teenagers in Chicago’s Grant Park made the first official discovery. More than 20 years passed before a second casque was found, in 2004, by attorney Brian Zinn in Cleveland’s Cultural Gardens.

Fast-forward another 15 years, to March 2019. Another discovery was made, this time in Golden Gate Park. In a dig attended by a Treasure Ranger at the top of Huntington Falls, on Strawberry Hill, a French treasure hunter uncovered a box. To determine if the find was real, SF Rec and Park reached out to Joellen Trilling, the artist who made each casque by hand back in 1982. She confirmed that the box was a fake. Ginsburg says it’s a mystery whether the French treasure hunter buried the find himself, as part of a hoax, or discovered something else that day that had once been buried above the falls.

The mystery of the book’s continuing allure is a different story. The Secret was panned by critics, yet something about its plot and the ongoing intrigue of its hidden treasure has managed to captivate readers for nearly 40 years. On a PB Works page (a collaborative online editing platform), some of the book’s most fervent treasure hunters have collected “several decades of work on solving these puzzles” into a comprehensive wiki. Another online forum, created at Something Awful in 2013, garnered more than 1,200 comments, theories, and clues within a week.

And then there are the photo albums. Dozens have been created on Flickr and PhotoBucket to share images and maps of purported casque locations in the hope that someone, somewhere, will untangle Preiss’s cryptic riddles.

Golden Gate Park remains one of the most likely locations for the San Francisco casque, and the one favored by Ginsburg. The treasure’s clue-riddled painting—a woman wearing a dress embroidered with a dragon in a rectangular box—looks remarkably similar to a map of the 1,017-acre park and the roads that run through it.

“Her hands are crossed over like Crossover Drive,” Ginsburg says, and “to the west of Crossover Drive, there’s a rose and a timepiece [in the painting]. We’ve got a rose garden which is nearby.”

The rhyming verse corresponding to the illustration may reference other hyperlocal landmarks visible from, or passing through, this section of the park—the spires of the University of San Francisco (or the iconic Sutro Tower), and Highway 1.

But not everyone is convinced. In an episode of Rec and Park’s podcast, “I Left My Park in San Francisco,” historian-in-residence Christopher Pollock laid out his theory that the casque is actually buried in the Marina Green—on the city’s north side, along the San Francisco Bay—in part because of a clue that may point to neighboring Fort Mason, the embarkation point for troops shipping out to the Spanish-American War and World Wars I and II.

Pollock believes a large flagpole on the green dedicated to early airmail carriers—who once used the park as a landing strip—may be the “giant pole” where “the casque is kept.”

It’s a location Santiago has become intimately familiar with. “The same person came to dig at the Marina Green on three separate occasions,” he says. “Each time they said that they found a new clue. They virtually dug all around the base of the flagpole but did not find anything.” The hunter, however, remains undeterred. “They are even slated to return again,” Santiago says.

Ginsburg says that after 37 years, “it’s possible that … [the casque is] not meant to be found. Or maybe someone already found it and walked away with it.”

Even if the treasure is found, its discoverer will win nothing but the pleasure of solving the puzzle: The real-life "wonderstones"—Preiss’s precious jewels—were sold in 2006 as part of a bankruptcy settlement following his untimely death.

But for most, Treasure Rangers included, the quest to uncover The Secret’s casques is about more than riches.

“It is kind of exciting to experience the hunt and witness people’s passion to find the hidden treasure,” says Santiago. “The fact that the story dates back almost 40 years ... makes the hunt even more intriguing.”

Jane Colden defied gender barriers to become an early expert in Linnaean taxonomy.

In 1728, the young Jane Colden moved with her family to a plot of land in the Hudson Valley that, according to her father, was populated less by people and more by “wolves, bears, and other wild animals.” Much of colonial New York was forested back then, and the overgrown landscape would become Colden’s office as she worked as a prolific amateur botanist, drawing and describing 400 species of plants that grew in her (relatively sprawling) backyard.

Though she spent her entire life isolated in this rural area, her work was recognized internationally, particularly by naturalists in the United Kingdom such as John Ellis, Peter Collinson, and the aptly named Alexander Garden. Today, Jane Colden is commonly acknowledged as the first female botanist in what would become the United States, noted for her forward-thinking adoption of the relatively new Linnaean taxonomy.

Colden was born in 1724 in New York City, but her family soon abandoned urban life for Orange County, New York, notes Anna Murray Vail in her 1907 paper “Jane Colden, an Early New York Botanist,” published in the journal Torreya. In the country, her politician father could pursue his varied extracurricular interests, including botany.

Jane’s father encouraged her to study the numerous species of plants that grew on the family’s 3,000 acres of wilderness. He had just learned of a newfangled system of categorizing plants, devised by Carl Linnaeus, and was eager to impart his knowledge—even if his reasons for introducing his daughter to the field were slightly condescending. “I thought that botany is an amusement which may be made agreeable for the ladies who are often at a loss to fill up their time,” her father once wrote. Under her father’s tutelage, Jane soon became an expert on Linnaean botany.

Before the 18th century, the field of botany was kind of a mess. Identification often involved monikers from the Middle Ages, steeped in religious significance and anything but uniform. So when Linnaeus introduced a system of taxonomy in which each specimen received two Latin names, the first designating the genus and the second the species. With this system, Linnaeus transformed scientists’ knowledge of plants into a universal system.

Key to Linnaeus’s system, however, was the division of plants into two genders, male and female. He established 24 classes based on the number of male stamens in the flower, and then subdivided each class into subordinate order based on the number of female pistils. He devised lengthy metaphors that conflated plant and human reproduction, analogizing various parts of a flower to human reproduction in Philosophia Botanica.

This categorization system was scientifically innovative and culturally taboo. Suddenly, botany had become the most explicit public discourse on sexuality in the mid-18th century, writes Caroline Jackson-Houlston in “Queen Lilies’? The Interpenetration of Scientific, Religious and Gender Discourses in Victorian Representations of Plants.” The open discussion of sex between, well, plants, erected another barrier for prospective female botanists, as the field now suggested a problem of sexual decorum, Jackson-Houlston writes. (In 1895, the pioneering feminist Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy would reappropriate this sexualized language in her botany primer Baby Buds, which doubled as a sex-education handbook at a time when talking about such things was wildly taboo, The Atlantic reports.)

In 1753, Colden gave herself the mission of sketching and classifying all the plants that grew in her family estate with the Linnaean system, according to Vail. She saw her work as an extension of her father’s more modest paper on the plants. She documented each in painstaking detail, accompanying each entry with a print rubbing or line drawing of the sprout in question.

Unlike most male botanists of the day, Colden noted the practical uses of each plant in medicine and cooking, and even attributed these details to the country people or local indigenous people who taught her. She described hundreds of plants without venturing beyond her family’s acreage, as the French and Indian War made travel dangerous.

Colden compiled her illustrated volume of New York’s plants for five years. During that time, her father wrote to leading botanists including John Bartram, Collinson, and Garden, often including specimens she found. The botanists soon grew acquainted with her work and respected her as a peer. Bartram even visited Colden, who took him out seed-hunting after dinner.

In 1758, Colden completed her untitled manuscript, which would later be called “Flora of New York.” In rich, meticulous descriptions, she noted the morphological details of flowers and fruits as well as their practical uses. Despite the limited educational opportunities afforded to women in the 18th century, it was clear Colden had become an early expert in the flashy, burgeoning field of Linnaean taxonomy.

In the final years of her project, Colden did hone one other notable accomplishment. As one visitor wrote, “She makes the best cheese I ever ate in America.” Colden compiled a record of her many cheeses in a folio she called the “Memorandum of Cheese made in 1756.”

Despite repeated attempts, many supported by her male allies, Colden never managed to have a species named after her. In 1758, John Ellis informed Linnaeus himself that he believed Colden had described a plant that was colloquially known as goldthread, and suggested that it be named in her honor, Vail writes. “Suppose you should call this Coldenella, or any other name that might distinguish her among your Genera,” he wrote, adding that Colden had described 400 plants under his own taxonomy. Linnaeus declined to recognize the species in a new genus, a decision that was later reversed by Richard Anthony Salisbury, who chose the name Coptis. Colden’s father, however, did have a genus named after him—Coldenia.

In 1759, Colden married William Farquhar, a Scottish physician, and stopped producing her botanical manuscript. In 1766, at the age of 41, she died in childbirth along with her first child. “Flora of New York” disappeared for a decade after her death, until a Hessian forester and botanist noted that it had come into his possession. After passing through the hands of several more men, the volume went to the British Museum in Kensington, London in the mid-1800s.

In 1957, in Colden’s hometown of Orange County, the Garden Clubs of Orange and Dutchess Counties constructed the Jane Colden Memorial Garden at Knox’s Headquarters State Historic Site, according to Michael McGurty, Knox’s site manager. The volunteers only planted native species that Colden described in her book, such as the delicate shrub spicebush shrub, the three-petaled trillium flower, and the distinctive hooded flower Jack-in-the-Pulpit.

Because the garden is essentially a volunteer project, it’s gone through phases of dereliction, according to Chad Johnson, the interpretive programs assistant. Starting in the 1960s, it was almost entirely tended by a woman named Dorothy Shreve. But by the early 90s, in large part due to aging volunteers and the economic recession, the garden was good as abandoned. But in 2014, John Hunter, a retired local superintendent, revived the garden. “It was an overgrown bramble full of Floribunda roses and raspberry bushes,” Hunter says. “We lost a few pints of blood yanking those out over a year or two.”

In the past few years, Hunter and another volunteer, Ed O’Connor, have uncovered and replanted many species that grew in the original garden, including trout lilies and Virginia bluebells. It’s an ongoing project, he says, and they’re always looking for help.

The garden is open to visitors during Knox’s Headquarters’ usual operating hours, from May 23 to September 2. “It’s less impressive than it sounds,” Johnson says over the phone. “It’s not a formal French garden or anything. It’s more of a nature walk, with plants that are best admired up close,” he says. “But that feels right for Jane.”

This niche practice was commonplace in North America for centuries.

Hank Shaw bakes his buttermilk biscuits with bear fat. “The most breathless prose has always been reserved for bear fat in pastries,” writes the American chef, hunter, and outdoorsman. Melting much the same as pork, bear lard is used to make pie crusts, tortillas, popcorn, and more—and has been for some time.

While the technique is rare today, bear fat was a common ingredient for centuries, though one with a unique hangup. As with all omnivores, bears’ fat takes on the general flavor of their diet. In early fall, when nuts, berries, and acorns dot North America’s forests, Shaw writes, bear fat is “sublime … virtually indistinguishable from the finest pork lard you can buy or make.” The fat of blueberry-eating bears in Montana, for example, assumes sweet, fruity hints and a slight purple tinge. But if a bear most recently ate fish or suburban garbage, the lard takes on a briney odor that ranges from low-tide to truly vile.

This game of seasonal flavor roulette has relegated the practice of harvesting and rendering bear fat to a small subset of hunters and their families. “You hunt when the berries are out, you hunt when the nuts are out, but most people don’t know any better,” says Shaw. Bear fat wasn’t always this fringe; but then again, it wasn’t always food, either.

Bear fat was once the Swiss army knife of North America. Native American tribes variously used it to weatherproof knives and bows, moisturize drum hides, straighten their hair, and repel insects. In the 19th century, European settlers brought to the Americas the belief that bear grease effectively treated hair loss. In London, John George Wood wrote in 1856, “it was the custom for … hairdressers to keep bears on their premises.” Many Londoners, he adds, paid for the privilege of rubbing their heads on the bear’s body, so as to ensure they got real bear grease. The Apaches used bear fat in glass jars to predict the weather, a practice handed down to G. Gordon Wimsatt, the “Bear Grease Kid,” who, in the mid 1900s, used it to forecast more accurately than the days’ leading meteorologists.

The versatility and abundance of black bear made it a key part of the food supply as well. Dr. Michael Wise, Director of the University of Texas Food Studies Program, says cooking with bear fat was widespread throughout North America until the mid- to late-19th century. He points to French Louisiana colonists who incorporated American ingredients to mimic European dishes. As one Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny wrote in the 1720s, his company rejoiced in dressing a green salad with bear fat and oak sap, or crafting a bear fat roux. Tougher bear fat could be melted and poured over game meat in bags for frontier preservation. (“Kind of like saran wrap,” says Wise.) Daniel Boone established a veritable bear enterprise in Kentucky throughout the 1790s, selling the meat, hide, and oil from 156 bears in one season.

Urbanites ate their fair-share of bear as well. At an honorary dinner thrown in Manhattan for Charles Dickens and 3,000 guests, the entrée was roast leg of bear, according to Four Pounds Flour. At the time, bear was a high-end delicacy sold throughout urban markets and restaurants. Eating bear remained in the American lexicon well into the 20th century, with recipes appearing in popular cookbooks. Together with its profitable pelt, bear fats’ mishmash functionality nearly decimated North American populations by 1900.

Luckily, North Americans began to rethink their ursine approach. “Around the turn of the last century, bears in general moved [out of the] food bucket in [our] imaginations to something else,” says Shaw, “in no small part thanks to the advent of the teddy bear.” The story goes that mid-way through a luckless hunt in the early 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt’s aides caught and stunned a bear that they left tied to a tree for an executive dispatch. After Roosevelt spared the dazed bear, cartoonists fell over themselves recreating the event, and one New York toy store capitalized on the sensational pardoning, creating the inaugural “Teddy Bear.”

The period also witnessed a shifting American agricultural landscape that saved the bears from extinction. Food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson writes that as frontier areas became settled farmland, bears relocated to underpopulated areas while demand for their meat and fat deflated. “Why go bear hunting when you could raise beef, pork, and chicken (and their requisite fats)?” she asks. This newfound access to domesticated animal protein also led game animals such as woodchuck, possum, and raccoon to fall quickly out of favor. Upton Sinclair’s 1937 groundswell novel The Jungle, writes Johnson, emboldened vegetable-oil companies to slander meat byproducts, further contributing to a decrease in demand for game fat.

Simultaneously, national legislation pushed by conservationists banned the commercial sale of game animals and regulated the hunting of at-risk species. Thanks to the clampdown on market hunting, bear populations stabilized throughout the 20th century. Bear meat and fat was supplanted by cheap and consistent factory animals, and knowledge surrounding the rendering of bear fat slid into obscurity.

Today, the American black bear is categorized as a species of “least concern” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Some 900,000 black bears roam the forests of North America, covering 40 of the 50 United States. An audacious display of their return came in the 1990s, when a young group of bears in Southern California began ambling nightly down from Los Padres National Forest to gorge themselves on the avocado orchards below. As the bears hardly put a dent in seasonal yields, the owners welcomed the feeding, naming the perpetrators “Guacamole Bears.”

New Jersey, home to the densest population of bears, resumed issuing annual bear hunt permits in 2010. Despite releasing a “Black Bear Recipe Guide,” the state saw twice as many black bears born in 2017 as were hunted. Populations have doubled in Florida since 2002, and in Canada they’ve reoccupied 95 percent of the lands they once roamed. “American black bears are doing well all over,” Harry Spiker told National Geographic.

While the bears have rebounded, the secret of cooking with their sweet, velvety fat did not. “You tell someone you’re bear hunting and they look at you funny,” says Shaw. The nose-to-tail movement, which focuses on cooking every part of the animal for culinary and environmental reasons, did elicit a resurgence in hunting over the last 10 years, Shaw tells me over the phone from a hunting-training program in Texas. But many bear hunters and guides, not knowing when to hunt bear for fat that tastes delicious rather than disgusting, tell people to cut it all off.

Today, the practice of rendering bear fat is survived by the few in the know. He’s yet to try it, but Shaw has heard that the fat of Guacamole Bears is “legendary.”

Without the moths, the possums (cute) may starve (not cute).

September is springtime in Australia, which means that thousands of mountain pygmy-possums are waking up, ravenous, after five months of hibernation in the Victorian Alps. Luckily for the possums, Australian spring usually brings billions of bogong moths to the mountain range, in an annual migration that fills the air with the imperceptible vibrations of countless fluttering wings. So pygmy-possums never needed to worry about finding prey—until now.

Two years ago, the bogong moths stopped showing up, and when the hungry possums woke, they didn’t have much to eat. According to researchers from Zoos Victoria and the University of Melbourne, many of the moths seem to be getting lost, apparently derailed from their yearly nocturnal migration by human-caused light pollution. In September of this year, the researchers launched a citizen science campaign, Lights Off for Moths, asking Australians to keep the night sky a little dimmer and less distracting to help save the moths. In the process, they want to bring back what is “arguably Australia's cutest possum,” Sally Sherwen, the wildlife and conservation director at Zoos Victoria, writes in an email.

Bogong months, small brown bugs approximately the size of a paperclip, are not as cute as the pygmy-possums. But the moths complete an exceptional journey for such small creatures, according to a 2016 study in Frontiers Behavioral Neuroscience. To escape the heat of Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria, the moths flock to the mountains and huddle together in caves, forming colonies so massive that their brown wings look like tiny shingles. When summer ends in March, the moths leave the cave, return to the plains to breed, and die.

Despite having no memory of this enormous migration, the next generation of bogong moths sets out along the same path—a rare and enormous instinct for any creature, let alone an insect. The monarch butterfly completes a similarly long and directed journey. But while the monarch takes cues from the sun as a compass, the moths travel at night, relying on the Earth's magnetic field as well as visual cues that are more unreliable and difficult to spot, according to the study. As the moths flap through the night, they’re easily derailed by the bright lights of towns and cities, drawn to the proverbial flame. (For many moth species, the attraction to light can be fatal, as it exposes them to predators or causes them to overheat and die, according to National Geographic.)

Hence the “Lights Off for Moths” campaign, which asks Australians to turn off their lights from September 1 to October 31, during the moths’ peak migration. “If people turn their outdoor lights out, we are giving Bogong Moths the best chance to reach their migratory destination,” Sherwen says. The researchers also want to know where the moths have gone off track, so Zoos Victoria has launched the Moth Tracker app, which allows people to send in any pictures of migrating moths. Sightings will likely occur after dark, as the moths become active, Sherwen says.

Unfortunately, artificial light pollution isn't the only thing plaguing the bogongs. Extreme drought in the species' breeding areas, which may be linked to climate change, and pesticide use in agriculture have also contributed to the catastrophic decline of the population, according to The Guardian. But the researchers still believe reducing unnecessary light pollution would be a small sacrifice for Australians and a big help to the moths.

Meanwhile, to stave off starvation in the possum population, scientists have developed a short-term solution. Researchers leading a captive pygmy-possums breeding program at Zoos Victoria analyzed the nutritional makeup of a bogong moth to develop a suitable substitute, which they’ve named a Bogong Ball. They’re considering airdropping these balls to feed the possums, pointing to successful supplementary feeding strategies that have helped species such as the endangered Helmeted Honeyeater in the Yellingbo Conservation Reserve in Victoria. Sherwen says this kind of food-dropping has never been attempted before for pygmy-possums, so the researchers are collaborating with the Mountain Pygmy-Possum Recovery Team, which plants additional trees and shrubs to help the possums find alternate food sources.

If pygmy-possums disappear, so too could some Victorian Alps flora. The small possums eat nectar and pollen from banksias and bottlebrushes, and in the process they serve the important function of pollination, according to Bush Heritage Australia.

Even if the moths were to come back, pygmy-possums don’t have it easy, Sherwen says—there are approximately 2,000 left remaining in the wild. The critters’ already imperiled existence could get more difficult as climate change reduces the snow cover necessary for their hibernation, human construction encroaches further on their habitat, and introduced predators such as feral cats and foxes prey on the remaining individuals. They’re so small that even large spiders can pose a threat. Still, Sherwen sees the bogong moths (or lack thereof) as the most pressing threat to the pygmy’s future. Bogong balls may do the trick, but there’s nothing like the real thing.

Archeologists have dug up sake bottles and delicate rice bowls.

At first, it didn’t look like much: a clearing about an hour’s walk into the dense forest of British Columbia’s Seymour Valley, with some rusted cans scattered among the dank leaves and moldy tree trunks. It was 2004, and Bob Muckle, an archaeologist and anthropology instructor at Capilano University, was looking for a site to teach his students excavation. When a forester told him about the household artifacts locals had found in the clearing, Muckle assumed the area had been an early-1900s logging camp, one of the many small settlements that housed men who worked in the area’s timber industry.

But when the team started digging, they uncovered something unexpected: delicate, intact, blue-and-white china rice bowls whose undersides were stamped “Made in Japan.” Excavations quickly unearthed more objects—sake bottles, ceramics—suggesting the camp had been occupied not by transient loggers, but by a community of about 50 to 60 Japanese Canadians, including women and children, over a period of 20 years.

The people who lived here were likely employees of Eikichi Kagetsu, a prominent Japanese-Canadian logger. While the team has yet to uncover definitive proof of how long the village was inhabited, Muckle theorizes residents stayed from around 1920 to 1942, far after logging work dried up and other camps closed shop in the mid-1920s. In a woodsy nook an hour’s bus ride from Vancouver and another hour’s walk into the forest, residents built a small, self-reliant village. With racism against Japanese Canadians on the rise, says Muckle, the village’s remote location may have provided inhabitants with a sense of security. “They just could have stayed there on their own without being interfered with.”

Muckle’s team has been excavating ever since. The artifacts they uncovered reveal a community that maintained their cultural and culinary traditions, even in the middle of the woods. The team found delicate soup and rice bowls, likely bought in Vancouver’s Japanese neighborhoods after a laborious trek, which indicated that inhabitants still ate traditionally, probably with chopsticks. They uncovered a square of nitrogen-rich garden soil, fertilized with bone meal, which at one time may have been lush with Japanese vegetables such as daikon and fuki. Even rarer, the team found the remnants of a traditional Japanese-style bathhouse and shrine, suggesting an attempt at recreating traditional village life unparalleled in North America.

“It surprised me when I saw those artifacts. I thought ‘Oh! That’s pretty nice china!,’” says Linda Kawamoto Reid, reference archivist at Canada's Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Center. Indeed, the fine quality reveals that village inhabitants sought to make the remote space feel like home. But, says Muckle, they also carry a more sinister implication: that residents likely left in a hurry.

“Usually when people abandon a site, they take the good stuff with them,” says Muckle. But here, the good stuff was left behind: parts of a camera hidden by the bath house, an expensive cook stove stashed as though someone meant to come back to retrieve it. To Muckle, this suggests the village’s residents left the site by force—possibly in 1942, when, just as in the United States, the Canadian government began interning Japanese citizens and their Japanese-Canadian descendants.

While World War Two was the tipping point, racist sentiment had been building against Canada’s Japanese community for a long time. It was fueled, partly, by white Canadians’ resentment of Japanese Canadian’s growing economic power, including their agricultural success. The first Japanese immigrants reached British Columbia in 1877, and worked as laborers in agriculture, lumber mills, fisheries, railroads, and mines. Despite racist policies meant to prevent Japanese land ownership, Japanese communities thrived. Many families acquired land, which they often held collectively, started farms, and became pioneers in British Columbia’s berry industry. They used their earnings to build self-reliant communities centered around institutions such as Buddhist temples and Japanese-language schools.

This self-sufficiency extended to the community’s culinary life. Early Japanese immigrants in Canada, particularly male railroad workers, existed on meager, employer-supplied diets that mixed Japanese and Canadian elements, writes archaeologist Douglas Edward Ross in his dissertation on early Asian-Canadian food cultures. “Since bread was expensive and we couldn’t afford the same foods as whites, we ate dumpling soup for breakfast and supper,” said one railroad worker of life in the early 1900s.

As the community grew, so did their imprint on Canada’s culinary landscape. In each Japanese neighborhood, says Reid, “There would have been a tofu maker, absolutely. There would have been somebody making miso.” Local communities likely milled their own rice. Japanese neighborhoods in cities such as Vancouver also supplied sake and tableware imported from Japan, including, Muckle speculates, some of the bowls and bottles at the Seymour Valley site.

Internment ruptured this thriving community. On February 24, 1942, after Canada’s entrance into World War Two, the federal Cabinet issued an order enabling the detention of “any and all persons” from areas deemed sensitive. These broad powers were used to target Japanese communities. By March 16, Canadian officials transported the first group of Japanese Canadians to Hastings Park, a race track and exhibition ground in Vancouver. Officials housed women and children in barns. Those who resisted were sent to prisoner of war camps.

Interned Japanese Canadians—including, evidence suggests, those villagers from the Seymour Valley—were forced to leave almost everything behind. “They were only able to take one suitcase, anything that they could carry,” says Muckle. The Canadian government took the rest. Originally claiming they’d keep Japanese Canadians’ confiscated land in “protective custody,” the state of British Columbia encouraged the Canadian government to sell the property instead, using the proceeds to run internment camps.

“They talked the federal government into confiscating the property and selling it off so that internees could pay for their own internment,” says Reid. “It’s just highway robbery.” Many Japanese Canadians—those who weren’t forced to work on road crews—were made to labor on sugar beet farms.

The trauma and displacement of internment caused many Japanese Canadians to lose track of their family histories. Another means of erasure, says Reid, was shame. Humiliated by racist treatment, many survivors preferred not to talk about that time. “There was this code of silence,” Reid says.

But in a clearing deep in the Seymour Valley, objects speak. In the years since they discovered the site, Muckle and his team have uncovered hundreds of objects, each holding stories of a lost way of life: A key to a home that has disappeared. A stopwatch that ceased telling time years ago. Milk bottles for babies that have long since grown. Stacked in the shadows of monumental, lichen-dusted trees, the blue-and-white rice bowls look ghostly, minute and delicate. Their presence is a poignant reminder of the communities broken up by racist government policies.

For Reid, these remnants of culinary life are also testimonies to Japanese Canadians’ strength. The Seymour Valley village, which the British Columbia government has commemorated for its significance to Japanese-Canadian history, is one of many archaeological sites whose objects reveal hidden memories. Among these sites are the fields of Tashme, the largest Canadian internment camp, which are now open for occasional tours. At a recent tour of the site, Reid says, the curator showed visitors a field where, after more than 70 years, the lush green leaves of fuki, planted by internees, continue to reach toward the sun.

“You’d have to survey people to see what would be the one thing, the one piece of food or vegetable that would signify the Japanese-Canadian spirit,” says Reid. “It might be fuki. Because it’s still growing.”

Colored by algae and beloved by bathers, Lake Retba is a prime source of salt—and backbreaking labor.

A resonant crunch reverberates as Boubacar Keita thrusts his wooden baton into the pink water. Another blow triggers a pulsating, circular ripple that seems to continue on for half a mile. A third swing brings a conclusive crack, and Keita’s figure plunges below the surface.

A few moments later he resurfaces, waist-high and dripping, sparkling in the sunlight. Contrasted with the radiant body of water he’s wading in, it makes for a biblical scene. But the traces of white residue that coat his sinewy torso reveal what he’s searching for: salt.

As much as 11 ounces of the mineral are contained in a quarter-gallon of water in the Lac Retba, aka the Lac Rose or Lake Retba—a lagoon on the edge of the Cap Vert Peninsula, about 22 miles northeast of Senegal’s capital, Dakar. That’s 10 times the level found in the nearby Atlantic Ocean, just a thousand feet away, and enough to rival Utah’s Great Salt Lake, Australia’s Spencer Lake, even Lake Retba’s famous Middle Eastern cousin, the Red Sea.

A kind of microalgae known as Dunaliella salina thrives in this extreme salinity. By producing a pigment from the beta-carotene family, in order to maximize the amount of light it can absorb, it forms one of the natural world’s most mesmeric sights.

At the height of the dry season, from January to March, when the midday sun blazes unforgivingly and strong winds blow in from the Atlantic, Lake Retba is at its most colorful: a beguiling sherbet pink. As weather patterns and times of day change, a glorious spectrum of shades emerges—from strawberry milkshake and Pepto-Bismol to coral, fuchsia, and an almost chocolate brown. The pigment even lends the waterside bushes of samphire, a plant-like vegetable that is typically green, an intense magenta hue.

Bathers are drawn by the great beauty, and buoyancy, offered by the salt. Workers from all over West Africa are drawn here too, to mine the mineral that forms the floor of the lake. Since the 1970s, when economic woes triggered a search for new streams of income, Lake Retba’s salt crop has been harvested year-round. Each year the lake—two-and-a-half miles long, half a mile wide, and 10 feet deep (50 percent of which is the submerged salt crust)—hosts some 3,000 laborers.

Most work for themselves. Slim profit margins and low salt yields mean there’s not enough money here to draw big businesses. But it is a job, and collectively these miners dredge up and extract nearly 60,000 tons of salt each year.

Keita, a 25-year-old from Mali, is among them. Every morning he and his fellow workers take wooden boats to the pink waters in search of salt. They rub shea butter—derived from the nuts of local trees—into their skin to protect it from the corrosive effect of the saline, which can cause cuts and abrasions, and the punishing tropical heat, which can reach up to 100 degrees (Fahrenheit). They also apply strong glue to seal the wounds they acquired the day before.

It’s backbreaking labor—the opposite of la vie en rose. Keita must split the salty lakebed before he can shovel weighty piles of salt onto his wooden boat. The mineral can be grayish when it’s first extracted, because of the clay contained in the soil, and must be strained through a giant sieve. Like a Venetian gondolier, Keita guides his pirogue back to the shore once it’s full. He usually collects five boats’ worth of salt a day.

But his earnings are scant. Around $35 (in U.S. dollars) is paid for each ton of salt gathered—a week's work.

“It’s very tranquil here, and it is beautiful,” Keita says. “But the work is very tiring. ” His lack of education and qualifications, however, mean that his options are limited—and the daily grind must go on. “If I had the choice I would leave,” he says. “I’m at the bottom rung of life here.”

The collected salt produces a sci-fi landscape, with mounds like a Chinese karst region lining the shallow lagoon. Women, who work only on land here, carry the salt left by miners—either in boats or on the water's edge—over to the hulking mounds nearby, one 55-pound bucket at a time. These contain crystals the size of a fist—a sort of rougher, hailstone-size cousin to Pink Himalayan salt. Some piles grow large enough to climb, offering a fine vantage point to survey the surroundings.

The value of iodized salt has risen in recent years—a positive development for at least a couple of reasons. One of them pertains to health: Millions of babies around the world, particularly in Africa, are born each year at risk of brain damage due to a lack of iodine in their diet. But only about half of all edible salt in Senegal is iodized, even though it's a key ingredient in many foods. (Local fishermen use it to preserve their haul, as fish forms a key part of Senegalese cuisine—in particular the national dish, a rice-based stew called thieboudienne.)

But thanks to the aid of local charities, salt workers have begun to add in the supplement, with a mixing machine, after the salt has been dried.

The other benefit is economic: Iodization can increase the value of the salt by up to 50 percent.

Today Lake Retba is under consideration to become a UNESCO World Heritage site. If it does, a still brighter future may be in store for this strange pink home to humanity's most important seasoning.

Teofilo Garcia may be the last Filipino to turn gourds he grows into headwear.

In a remote mountain village in the Northern Philippines, Teofilo Garcia greets me outside his workshop. Atop his head, a finely polished, yellow-orange hat glints in the sunlight. His workshop contains an abundance of similar hats, all in various stages of completion. Strips of bamboo are strewn across the floor, and bundles of rattan are piled on the counters. Some of the hats are bright in color, while others are dull and grimy, still caked with mud.

That’s because these are tabungaw hats, and Garcia has painstakingly handcrafted each one from a gourd grown in the fields surrounding his home.

For centuries, the Ilocano people in Northern Luzon, where Garcia lives, have worn these hats, which are called, like the vegetable they are formed from, tabungaw. High-school children wore them for graduations. Farmers sheltered themselves under their brims while ploughing fields. They’ve even been donned by revolutionaries charging into battle against the Spanish.

But, now, Garcia is one of the last tabungaw hat makers left in the Philippines. He may be the very last.

At 72 years old, Garcia has been crafting tabungaw hats for much of his life. In the workshop, after turning down the radio volume (he is deaf in one ear), he explains that his father taught him to make his first at age 15. “It’s a farmer’s hat and very practical for working in the sun,” he says. “When I was young, I remember everyone made them at home, but now it’s easier to buy a baseball cap at the market.”

For Garcia, making hats is a seasonal process. In June or July, he plants tabungaw seeds. They grow on the ground, but during the rainy season, he hangs the growing gourds from bamboo supports to protect them from bugs. In the fall, he harvests his hats.

Garcia gestures to the pile of green gourds drying in the mid-day heat outside the workshop, where he stacks the vegetables to harden the exterior. Their insides, though, become soft and mushy. “I leave them on the ground so the marrow inside is eaten by ants,” Garcia says. “It’s the best way to clean them!”

Even as a septuagenarian, Garcia does most of the work himself. Once the gourds are prepared and cleaned, he polishes and varnishes the shell to its bright-yellow or orange hue.

“I used to travel from village to village selling my hats,” Garcia says as he demonstrates how he weaves soft bamboo mesh to form comfortable padding inside the hat, which he strengthens with rattan that he collects in the mountains. “I went to the cockfighting arenas across Abra and sold them there too. There used to be more hat makers then, but now, I think it’s just me left.”

In Rizal Park, in the center of the capital city of Manila, a bust of Filipino revolutionary Diego Silang depicts him wearing a tabungaw hat. In 1763, Silang led a revolt against Spanish colonial rule. In a study of the revolt, scholar Fernando Palanco writes that while Silang himself was not a farmer, the core of his followers were “the least Hispanized and the poorest residents” in Ilocos. Tabungaw hats became such a symbol of revolution that the Spanish stopped Ilocanos from wearing them.

“When I was younger, I remember being told stories that tabungaw were worn into battle against the Spanish,” Garcia says. Silang was assassinated at age 32, in a hit ordered by Church officials to end his rebellion.

In an era of baseball caps (often worn by farmers in rice paddies) and indoor office work, wearing a tabungaw hat today is equally symbolic—a fact represented by a small monument in front of Garcia’s workshop, given to him in 2012 by the Filipino government, that announces that he is a “National Living Treasure” for keeping this tradition alive. Rather than use smoke to harden the hats for fieldwork, as he once did with an open fire, Garcia now uses varnish. The yellow hats stacked under a table are for an upcoming school graduation. Garcia also receives orders from politicians and generals, as well as the odd overseas hat collector.

The schoolchildren’s hats resemble the simple farmers’ hats of old, while other orders are more intricate, in line with how tabungaw hats once indicated social status. To make them, Garcia weaves thin strips of rattan into unique designs around the rim. “High ranking officials in Abra would wear the most elegant of these hats at ceremonies,” he says.

Crafting vegetables into hats has become an excellent niche business for Garcia, but he’s exacerbated that no one wants to take up his mantle. For years, he’s been searching, but even with funding from the government, he can’t entice any young apprentices in Abra to stay for more than a few days. His five children help occasionally, but they don’t see it as a career.

If Garcia can’t find an apprentice, he may well be the Philippines’ last tabungaw-hat maker, and the last person to lovingly craft a symbol of Filipino identity from nothing but seeds, water, and sunshine.

A professor in Texas collects and digitizes rare records from all across the country.

For the last dozen years, in the basement of a university library in Waco, Texas, a small team of audio engineers has been busy trying to save black gospel music. On a typical day, after delicately removing a scuffed vinyl record from its tattered sleeve, an engineer cleans the disc, places it onto a specialized turntable, and drops the needle. A moment later, an exhilarating music rises from the speakers, filling the small room with voices not heard in half a century. Once the song has come to an end, the audio file is loaded into a digital archive, and the record joins thousands of LPs and 45s that are stacked wall-to-wall in a climate-controlled room at Baylor University.

The current effort to preserve gospel recordings began in 2005, when Robert Darden, a journalism professor at Baylor, published an op-ed in The New York Times. He wrote that innumerable black gospel records, particularly from the “Golden Age” of the mid-1940s to the mid-70s, were at risk of being lost, whether because of damage or neglect. It was getting harder and harder to track down LPs of popular artists like the Soul Stirrers (who at one time featured a young Sam Cooke), to say nothing of 45s from largely obscure groups like the Gospel Kings of Portsmouth, Virginia. “It would be more than a cultural disaster to forever lose this music,” Darden wrote. “It would be a sin.”

Soon after publishing the op-ed, Darden was contacted by an investment banker named Charles Royce. Royce confessed he didn’t know much about gospel music, but the opinion piece had convinced him that preserving it was a worthwhile endeavor. “You figure out how to save it,” he said, according to Darden. “Send me a plan, and I’ll pay for it.”

Darden first began to recognize the crisis facing classic gospel music while working on his book, People Get Ready!: A New History of Black Gospel Music. He had previously worked as the gospel music editor for Billboard, and had written extensively on the genre, yet he often struggled to find the music he covered. “I’d been frustrated time and time again throughout the writing of the book, when I would write about a very important gospel song that had been influential in the history of gospel music, in some cases in popular music, and I couldn’t listen to it,” Darden says. “I’d go to the used record stores, and online, and everywhere I knew, and there just simply would not be a copy available.”

Darden and other record collectors estimated that around 75% of all gospel vinyl released during the Golden Age was no longer available. The records had been completely lost, or only a few remaining copies were known to be in circulation. Darden was determined to know how many of these records could be found, and how many were lost for good.

After Darden came up with a plan to find and preserve these records, Royce provided a grant of $350,000. Darden got right to work, establishing the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, or BGMRP, in 2007. Inside a sound-isolated room in the basement of Baylor’s Moody Library, gospel LPs, 45s, and 78s are cleaned, archived, and digitized by audio engineers, using state-of-the-art equipment. After each disc is processed, it becomes available to stream for free online, alongside any available original artwork and recording details.

One of the rare songs that Darden helped recover was “Old Ship of Zion,” recorded on a self-pressed 45 in the early 1970s by the Mighty Wonders, a group from Aquasco, Maryland. Darden recalls the first time he heard it: “Our engineer played it for me in the studio, and we both broke into tears.” Found in a box of miscellaneous 45s purchased on the East Coast, Darden spent the next five years trying to track down any information about it. During a public radio interview in Baltimore, a child of one of the original members of the group called in and introduced himself. Darden learned that the group itself didn’t even own a copy. Now one of the BGMRP’s most cherished finds, “Old Ship of Zion” is featured in the gospel section of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

Most of the music in the archive was loaned by collectors across the country or purchased at record stores by Darden and his team, but some have come from individual donations. Anyone is welcome to send music, either as a permanent donation or a loan. Darden says that opening a new box of records is “like Christmas.” Many of the records now in Baylor’s library, like the “Old Ship of Zion” 45, are among the only known copies in existence, Darden says. He estimates that he and his team have digitized around 14,000 items, including songs, LP jackets, and photos.

In a 2007 interview, shortly after launching the project, Darden told the public radio host Terry Gross, “We see it as kind of like those seed banks up around the Arctic Circle that keep one copy of every kind of seed there is in case there’s another Dutch elm disease. I just want to make sure that every gospel song, the music that all American music comes from, is saved.”

Darden, who is white, doesn’t come from a traditional church background. With a father in the Air Force, he grew up moving with his family from base to base. His parents owned a record of Mahalia Jackson singing Christmas songs, but Darden remembers first hearing gospel music in the homes of his black friends, whose parents were also in the Air Force. “That was the music that their parents were playing and singing,” he says. “I loved it from day one.”

The BGMRP focuses exclusively on music from gospel’s Golden Age, the roughly 30-year period that saw gospel music surge in popularity, owing to the musical innovations of artists such as Clara Ward, Mahalia Jackson, the Swan Silvertones, and the Dixie Hummingbirds. Darden points out that gospel’s Golden Age is also significant because it “corresponds with the era of the Civil Rights movement exactly, and it corresponds with the era of the greatest impact of the African-American church on the African-American community.” He adds, “They’re all intertwined. That’s why gospel matters. This was the music of the revolution.”

Reverend Clay Evans, a Baptist pastor in Chicago who has worked as a civil rights leader and gospel recording artist, has powerful memories of the Golden Age. He was born in 1925 and released his first musical project in 1985, with Savoy Records. “Gospel music motivated us,” Evans says. “Music gave us hope. Hope that we needed to continue to overcome. Hope that we were on the right trail to overcome the racism that existed. Hope that God was with us in the struggle.”

These days, selections from Baylor’s collection can be found in the National Museum of African American History & Culture, in Washington, D.C., as part of the museum’s permanent collection. But to access the entire collection in-person, visitors to Waco can drop by Lev’s Gathering Place, at Baylor University’s Crouch Fine Arts Library. Sitting on a reclaimed church pew and stained-glass windows, visitors can view photos and listen to thousands of songs on iPad kiosks.

In recent years, Darden and the BGMRP have begun another undertaking: archiving audio recordings of African-American preachers. Recorded sermons were once popular and profitable, especially leading up to and during the Civil Rights movement, but they too face the threat of being permanently lost. “Even less of that has been preserved,” Darden says. “From the Civil Rights movement, for instance, with the exception of Dr. King, virtually none of the sermons that changed America are preserved. Or, when they are preserved, they’re on somebody’s cassette in somebody’s warehouse in the South Side of Chicago.”

Upon learning of this project, Reverend Evans dug out several boxes of his broadcast sermons, some decades old and long-neglected, from a derelict storage space near his church in Chicago. Now 94 years old, Evans has contributed over 900 tapes of his broadcast sermons to the archive. For him, digitizing and archiving these records is about not only preserving a fundamental part of American history, but also providing inspiration to present and future generations.

“We face the same issues today, and we still need encouragement,” Evans says. He sees parallels between today’s struggles for social justice and the civil rights struggles of the past. “It’s good for children to know what we’ve been through. Then they can be encouraged to make it through, too.”

The history of this botanical drink is more spirited than you can imagine.

Sun-baked hay. A bustling Marrakech market. Pinecones on the forest floor. Though these may seem like prompts for a poem, they are in fact tasting notes from gin, a spirit with a history of being maligned and misrepresented. Perhaps worst of all for gin advocates though? It’s misunderstood.

“A lot of customers who don’t like gin have only consumed it with tonic,” says Brendan Bartley, bar manager at New York’s Bathtub Gin, which keeps 60 gins on hand. “The flavor profile of gin gets lost in translation, because most people don’t like tonic. It’s not the actual gin—gin has so many variants that there’s generally something for everybody.” Hence the 60 different bottles.

When it comes to what distinguishes gin from other spirits, the name itself offers a clue. “Gin” is a shortened version of the word “genever,” which has its origins in the Latin word juniperus, or “juniper.” That coniferous Christmas tree and shrub is an essential part of gin, as the spirit must draw its main flavor from juniper to be considered a gin in the United States. It also has to be fairly boozy. By definition, gin must have no less than 40 percent ABV (80 proof).

A stirred and sordid history

Centuries ago, gin tasted nothing like it does now as its swirled into Singapore Slings and mixed into martinis. Initially, it wasn’t even found in bars. In the mid 17th-century, gin was sold in Dutch and Flemish pharmacies, where it was thought to be an herbal panacea for everything from kidney problems to gout, and gallstones.

The gin-as-spirit craze didn’t really kick off until William III became King of England in 1689. He banned brandy, the drink of choice, and began offering tax benefits to British citizens who distilled their own spirits.

The free-for-all resulted in a gin distillation process that was, to put it mildly, disastrous. Turpentine, sulphuric acid, and sawdust were all involved in early iterations of the stuff, and gin was blamed for insanity, crimes, mania, and deaths due to overconsumption.

In 1830, Irish inventor Aeneas Coffey changed history with his patented still. It had two columns: one where the wash that would become gin was piped and warmed in copper wash-heaters, and a second where distilling took place. Suddenly, producing a clear, safe gin was not only possible, but popular.

Today, it’s only gotten more so: Even as alcohol consumption took a worldwide dip from 2017 to 2018, gin’s global consumption grew 8.3 percent, according to a 2019 report from International Wine and Spirits Research (IWSR). The drink’s popularity doesn’t show any signs of ceasing, either. Traditional gin is estimated to increase by five percent in the next four years, and industry experts say flavored gin will see a jump of around three percent.

Distilling takes on a new design

To make gin today, producers start with a neutral high-proof alcohol, whether it’s homemade or purchased. In the “one-shot” method, they then add the botanicals to the alcohol and draw out their “essences” by placing them in baskets exposed to steam. They can also put the botanicals directly in with the alcohol, and then dilute the mixture. The “concentrate” method, however, distills the botanicals separately with a small amount of water before mixing with distilled alcohol and water. (The “cold compound” method makes the cheapest gin by mixing botanicals with the neutral spirit, then filtering them out.)

Though fundamentals of still design have changed slightly, for purists, copper remains essential to transforming botanicals and neutral alcohol into gin. The metal is an excellent conductor of heat (second only to silver), keeping the temperature even through distillation. Copper also works double-time. It absorbs the sulfur produced during fermentation and yields a cleaner, smoother gin. So says Lewis Harsanyi, whose Los Angeles-based Bavarian Breweries and Distilleries provides companies with distilling systems.

As a soft metal, copper is also highly malleable, making it easy to manipulate and shape. Some of the most ornate copper stills in existence are built and hand-hammered by coppersmith Arnold Holstein, whose family has created custom distillation units on the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance since 1958.

Monkey 47 Gin’s hand-assembled “Apparatus Alembicus Maximus” required two years of Holstein’s collaboration, design, and craftsmanship. The 100-liter still—intentionally on the smaller side to optimize the surface ratio of copper to mash—produces just 25 liters of gin at a time. That makes each run among the most limited still-made gins in the world.

Botanicals make the brand

In addition to copper, other factors in the distilling process affect taste, from the size and shape of the still to the rate at which the alcohol is allowed to “pass through” and steam the botanicals, and for how long. It’s this flexibility—and potential for creativity—that has gin advocates excited about the future.

Many distillers liken their pursuit of flavor to perfumers drawing out different aromas from ingredients. Coriander seeds, for example, give a gin citrus and spice notes, while dried orris root (the root of the iris flower) helps gin taste vaguely floral and licorice-like. Saffron can bring to mind breakfasts of cinnamon toast, while cardamom can recall a smoky, perfumed friend. Lemongrass in the mix? On the tongue, it may read as freshly mowed grass—but in a good way.

“When we say a word like lavender, it conjures up a very specific notion: perhaps of lavender soap, or the fields in France,” says Aaron Knoll, who has written two books on gin and has officially reviewed more than 600 gins for his website, The Gin Is In. “But when you distill lavender it tastes fundamentally different. It can have a mentholic, grassy flavor to it. When we distill these botanicals, they are transformed beyond recognition. Rarely do things literally taste like what we’re familiar with.”

Aside from juniper, there is no minimum botanical requirement in gin, and there is no limit either. In fact, Monkey 47 Gin, the German spirit mentioned above, gets its unique profile from an extensive list of 47 different flavorents: Lavender, fresh hand-peeled citrus, and rose hips all join juniper to make the gin floral, sweet, and herbaceous. Around one-third of the botanicals—like spruce shoots, bramble leaves, and lingonberries—are even foraged directly from the Black Forest, where the distillery (dubbed “The Wild Monkey”) has been operating south of Lossburg, Germany, since 2015.

Looking at the list of botanicals found on most brand labels will not only give you clues about the flavor, but a glimpse of the time when (and place where) the recipe was created. “A lot of the darker spirits [like bourbon, Scotch, and rum] have very similar tasting notes, because they’ve got wood on them, they’re barrel aged,” says Bartley. “Gin’s [flavor] is accordant with where it comes from.”

All gins may have juniper, but juniper itself has between 50-67 species growing primarily across the Northern Hemisphere. Juniper grew in popularity hundreds of years ago because it was ubiquitous in Europe. Citrus first started to join juniper in gin recipes around the 19th century, when fresh lemons and oranges were considered an alluring luxury item. Across gin today, makers are incorporating local botanicals—from hand-picked buchu in South Africa’s Western Cape to pink peppercorn found high in the Peruvian Andes.

Monkey 47’s dozens of ingredients are rooted in a recipe that traces its origins to 1951, when a man named Montgomery Collins left the Royal Air Force and moved to the Black Forest. Though Collins was first interested in watchmaking, the surrounding herbs and juniper inspired him to turn his attention to making gin. Decades later, Collins’ first Black Forest gin was discovered in a dusty, hand-decorated bottle in his guesthouse, which he had named “The Wild Monkey Inn” after adopting a monkey from the Berlin zoo. The long list of botanicals included alongside the bottle would later serve as the base of Monkey 47 Gin.

“No other spirit presents such a blank canvas onto which a distiller can tell a story about a place or a culture or a process, or paint this artistic vision,” says Knoll. “But if we were to narrow down the lens of what could be considered gin, I think we would be much poorer for it. Because I don’t think there’s another medium where people are learning so much about botanical diversity. There are so many things out there. And so there’s no end in sight.”

Studying the highly endangered species requires a little colorful creativity.

Though you’d never guess it from their brown, somewhat unkempt appearance, the Cuban greater funnel-eared bat is a little high maintenance. The species lives in a single cave in western Cuba that’s remote and as hot as a sauna. The bats are fragile, with spindly bones and leathery wings that feel as thin as paper, and they are extremely prone to dehydration. And as of this year, they’re starting to get pedicures.

To be fair, the pedicures are for science. They’re one biologist’s last-ditch strategy to count the rare and dwindling population of the bats, which were thought until recently to be extinct. “It’s the last living refugee [in an area that is] vulnerable to natural and anthropic alterations,” Jose Manuel de la Cruz-Mora, the bat researcher behind the study, from the Pinar del Río Museum of Natural History in the westernmost province of Cuba, writes in an email.

The Cuban greater funnel-eared bat was first discovered, in fossil form, by Harold Anthony, a zoologist at the American Museum of Natural History, in 1917. Anthony found a mandible from a strange species of bat in Cuevas del Indio, a cave on the coastal mountains of western Cuba. The mandible had an unusually “plump” molar and was stained dark brown, leading Anthony to conclude that it “probably represents an extinct form,” he wrote in a 1919 paper describing the species, which he named Natalus primus.

After Anthony’s description, everyone assumed N. primus was long extinct. In the 1970s, Gilberto Silva Taboada, an internationally renowned expert on Caribbean bats, began a survey of the bat species of Cuba. In pursuit of N. primus—dead or alive—Silva tracked down the cave Anthony visited, using a single photo the naturalist took, and arrived there via rowboat, as Yamile Luguera Gonzalez reports for Cuba’s Radio Cadena Agramonte. Once inside the cave, he found an enormous, rotting tree and abundant fossilized remains of N. primus. In the years following, Silva and other paleontologists unearthed more evidence of the bats going back as far as the Pleistocene, around 11,000 years ago, in more than a dozen separate locations in Cuba—suggesting it once flitted across the entire island, says de la Cruz-Mora, who is also a fellow at the Zoological Society of London’s EDGE program, which stands for “Evolutionary Distinct and Globally Endangered.”

As all of the known remains of N. primus were fossilized, there was nothing to suggest that the species was anything but extinct—until 1992, when biologists Adrian Tejedor and Dialvys Rodríguez-Hernández, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and ECOVIDA in Pinar del Río, respectively, managed to capture an individual of N. primus, according to the researchers’ 2004 study in Mammalian Biology. The researchers did not find N. primus in the Cuevas del Indio, but in Cueva la Barca, in Guanahacabibes National Park. The park boasts more than 150 square miles of protected land and coast and is considered one of Cuba’s most intact natural sites. He spirited the specimen to Havana, where Silva confirmed it was a Cuban greater funnel-eared. Researchers revisited the cave to confirm that the bat belonged to a living population. After several more expeditions, N. primus was officially declared back from the dead.

Like most bats, N. primus is little and brown, approximately two inches of tawny fluff. That actually qualifies it as a medium-sized bat, though it’s the largest in the family Natalidae. Unlike most bats, however, N. primus prefers to roost in hot caves. According to de la Cruz-Mora, hot caves are usually ones with enclosed, humid, pocket-like chambers with temperatures that can top 104 degrees Fahrenheit. This makes good roosting spots rare, and pretty much rules out the possibility of other, undiscovered populations; scientists have already checked all of Cuba’s other hot caves.

N. primus is quite susceptible to dehydration, hence the predilection for humidity. For this reason, the bats forage in a close radius around the cave, which makes the environmental integrity surrounding the cave extremely important. Evolutionarily speaking, they’re far from flexible.

Though the researchers know for sure there is a population of N. primus in Cueva la Barca, they have had no idea how large it is. And finding out is not easy. Getting to the cave in the first place requires trekking through a bramble studded with snakes, spiders, and scorpions. And once inside, there is no easy or obvious way to count every bat. So the researchers decided to estimate the population as best they could using a mark-and-recapture method. This involves catching a few individuals, marking them without harming them, and releasing them, and then doing the whole thing over again. How often they capture already marked individuals over time can then be used to extrapolate the overall population size.

But N. primus are too fragile to be banded or marked with the kinds of conventional tags researchers use for birds and larger bats. So the biologists came up with the idea of a highly specific pedicure, along with a small patch of hair shaved from the back. De la Cruz-Mora and his colleagues painted a code on one of each bat's feet using four colors—white, red, pink, and sunshine yellow—one color to a claw. (Despite other reportage on de la Cruz-Mora’s work, which refers to the nail treatment as a "manicure," these treatments might better be described as pedicures, as the varnish goes on the bats’ foot-claws.)

Catching the bats, however, was another challenge. The researchers conducted the survey during January and February 2019, a time when the bats were not reproducing. De la Cruz-Mora used small hand nets (a mesh basket at the end of a handle) and mist nets (loose mesh suspended between poles) to collect individuals. After one was captured, he would immediately place the animal in its own leather pouch to avoid accidental dehydration or any kind of physical harm. They painted the creatures’ claws while dangling them upside down; “not a problem for bats,” de la Cruz-Mora says. To keep handling to a minimum, the researchers spent less than five minutes per animal.

Perhaps surprisingly, temporary nail polish made for humans—which has no toxic or harmful effects on the bats, de la Cruz-Mora says—has a history in wildlife conservation. Bird biologists sometimes paint the toenails of nestlings too small to band. Clear nail polish is often used as well, perhaps to take the impression of a threatened leaf or to kill botfly pupae while working in a rainforest.

When the researchers analyzed their data, they were unsurprised to find that the last remaining population of the Cuban greater funnel-eared bat is not quite robust. They estimate there are fewer than 750 individuals of N. primus living in the cave. De la Cruz-Mora says their goal now is to establish a long-term monitoring strategy so they can detect any changes in population, however small. The roof of Cueva la Barca is also subject to thermal instability, which could get worse as climate changes.

Due to its rarity, the bat is not well-studied. During the expeditions in the cave, de la Cruz-Mora hoped to evaluate the bats’ behavior, how the population is distributed, what they forage for, and how they do it. These kinds of observations are routine for bat biologists, and involve acoustic monitoring and a new kind of detecting equipment called AudioMoths, as well as the placement of mist nets around the cave. But de la Cruz-Mora was stunned to find that these monitoring techniques failed with N. primus. “The capture rate using mist nets was nearly zero, after more than 20 nights of hunting,” he says. And the same thing happened with their acoustic monitoring. “We were unable to identify, clearly enough, the echolocation calls of N. primus from the audio records collected in the field.” After all, N. primus is not the only bat that lives in Cueva la Barca. When they give it another go, the researchers will have to get creative again—only a pedicure won’t work this time.

On top of all this, the bat’s cave lies near the border of the national park, so researchers are worried that N. primus’s only habitat may not be as protected as it would be if it were deeper in. For now, the most urgent task is to revise N. primus’s status on the IUCN Red List to gain global recognition for just how endangered the species is, de la Cruz-Mora says. He also plans to establish a community-based conservation campaign at his museum to ensure the locals are aware of the threats facing their winged neighbors.

Introducing the Cuban greater funnel-eared bat in hot caves across the island is still a ways away. “A reintroduction plan for N. primus is no more than a beautiful dream,” de la Cruz-Mora says. “For now, our efforts are focused on keeping the last living population of the species with us.”

Yet despite fragile body and specific needs, this population of N. primus has clearly persisted. “With all these risks around, N. primus stays alive,” de la Cruz-Mora says. “It is a fighter and a survivor.”

Alfonso Hernández Saguero is preserving an ancient way of life and its cherished foods.

Every morning in the valley of Jerte, deep in Spain’s remote Extremadura region, 40-year-old Alfonso Hernández Saguero makes a pilgrimage to a lonely hilltop to keep a dying tradition alive.

Hernández arrives before dawn to unlock the low-slung stone barn partially built into the hillside. It’s January, with frost on the grass, but inside it’s almost cozy, thanks to the 200-some black, long-horned goats curled up sleeping. They are Veratas, a breed indigenous to Extremadura and now considered endangered.

Hernández grabs a bucket and starts milking. Many goat farmers use a milking table, a platform with feed boxes and restraints that keep goats from fleeing or kicking. But Hernández simply squats down behind each goat. The milk zings against the side of the bucket; the goats don’t kick or fuss. Maybe this is because Hernández is a fourth-generation goatherd, and some of these goats are descendants of the ones he began taking care of at such a young age that he can’t remember when he first started doing the work. “You could say I was born a goat,” he jokes.

The milking finished, Hernández leads the Veratas out of the stable with a high-pitched whistle, two collie mixes barking eagerly at his side. The goats move along the barren mountainside, making do with what’s available in winter. They gobble up ivy, blackberry brambles, and cantueso, a wild herb that smells like lavender and rosemary. Hernández is relaxed but alert. “You have to go with your sixth sense in front of you,” he says, intuiting where the goats are headed next.

For thousands of years, this type of pastoreo extensivo, the grazing of goats on broad areas of wild land and pasture, has been a mainstay of rural life in Spain. It has left a deep mark on both national and Extremeño cuisine, from the wide variety of Spanish goat cheeses to the roast cabrito (kid) eaten at Christmas. But in the 21st century, traditional goatherds such as Hernández have become as endangered as his Veratas, even in Extremadura, where agriculture is still king. According to local records, from 1960 to 2019, the number of goats being raised in the Valley of Jerte dropped from 26,000 to 3,000.

As the sun rises, the landscape appears in all its eye-popping glory: the Garganta de los Infiernos (in English, the Gorge of Hell), a stunning natural reserve that draws more than 300,000 tourists each year. Most come in summer, to swim in Los Pilones, a series of crystalline natural pools carved in the river bed’s pale granite. On a winter day like this one, Hernández will be lucky to encounter the odd hiker. But when he was a child, about a dozen families led their herds each day along the steep slopes of the Gorge of Hell. “You even had to change your route so you wouldn’t run into another herd,” he says. “Here I am [now], and it’s just me. Because everyone else has disappeared.”

In a clearing even higher up than the barn, Hernández and his herd pass signs of this lost community—ruins of round stone huts which goatherds have built and lived in for centuries. But these are relics of a recent past, not an ancient one. Until he was a teenager, Hernández, his parents, and three siblings drove their goats over backroads and trails from the warmer dehesa, or pasturelands, farther south to spend summer and autumn in one of these chozos. His grandparents built it by laying flat stones to form a floor and arranging branches to make a conical roof. Every summer, the family added a new layer of piorno, a kind of brush, to keep out the rain. The single room served as living room, bedroom, and kitchen. The bathroom? “In the street,” Hernández jokes.

Under those thatched roofs, the Hernándezes and other goatherding families whipped up dishes now considered delicacies in Extremadura. They ate sopas canas, a “white-haired soup” based on goat milk thickened with breadcrumbs and flavored with pimenton de la Vera, a strong paprika that now enjoys the European Union’s Protected Designation of Origin status. For dessert, they fried egg-and-bread-crumb dumplings and cooked them in goat milk to make sapillos, or boiled rice with goat milk and orange peel to make arroz con leche.

For the main course, goatherding families made use of every part of the cabrito. When Hernández makes a stew with wine and local bay leaves, he uses his grandmother’s trick of finishing the broth with pureed liver. He stews the feet in sauce, or makes them with rice. His mother used to sauté the brains and add them to the quintessentially Spanish tortilla de patata. Hernández’s favorite way to eat brain: Slice the young goat in half down the middle, from head to tail, tie laurel leaves around each half of the skull to keep the brain inside, and make a stew. Even the intestines—thoroughly washed—are delicious. Hernández cooks them with salt and bay leaves, chops them up finely, and sautés them with onion, bell pepper, and the goat’s own blood. They’re known as chanfaina.

From his parents and grandparents, Hernández learned not only how to cook with goat milk and meat, but how to play the many roles required of a goatherd. In summer, when his goats give birth, Hernández is a midwife. He’s a veterinarian year round, fixing broken legs and saving overly curious baby goats whose heads are stuck between large boulders that dot the hillside. When the goats are tranquil, he sits on a boulder with a view of the gorge and carves new bell-clappers from Holm oak, using one of his grandfather’s clappers as a reference.

For a few years, he documented these adventures, along with his cooking, on Facebook. He ended up with more than 1,000 followers, and Jerteños still know him as El Cabrero del Infierno, or the Goatherd of Hell. But he gave up posting because he didn’t want to be on his phone. He wanted to be with his goats.

As the light fades, Hernández leads his Veratas back down the hill to the stone stable. When Hernández was a child, his parents made their own cheese, sometimes smeared with olive oil and pimenton, and aged in their chozo. Every week, the Gorge of Hell goatherds loaded up their horses and rode down to Jerte, the nearest village, to sell their cheese. Villagers who are old enough still reminisce about this weekly market day.

The thermoses of milk in Hernández’s Land Rover, on the other hand, are destined for a large cheesemaker in a nearby town. Due to modern sanitary regulations, Hernández says he can’t afford the facilities to make his own cheese. (Don’t even mention the paperwork.) He jokes that if he looked too closely at his profits from milk, he might give up the job. That’s why, he says, he’s the only one left in the Gorge of Hell.

“[Others] get tired of it, abandon it. They take other alternatives.”

Hernández himself has been tempted to leave. At 19, he spent nine months doing voluntary military service in Madrid, and then nine years working around Jerte in forestry and agriculture. As a teenager, he had resented the long, grueling days of herding, but his time away, he says, “proved that this is what I wanted.” At 28, he started his own herd. Yes, he works 365 days a year, in rain, sun, and snow, but, he says, “I’m more satisfied, more happy than I would be in any other place.”

Hernández is not the only one trying to save this lifestyle, its animals, and its foods. About an hour southeast of Jerte, in the town of Casar de Cáceres, a group of Extremeños is working to transmit the pastoral tradition to the next generation. Their goal is to keep young people from fleeing rural areas, and to save a local delicacy from disappearing.

“We have a grave problem of generational loss,” says Mariangeles Muriel, director of the Fundación Cooprado, which was started by the agricultural cooperative Nuestra Señora del Prado Casar de Cáceres. Shepherds and cattle ranchers are aging out of the business, she says, and, unlike Hernández, the next generations are choosing to leave for cities and easier work. Rural depopulation is a problem throughout Extremadura, Spain’s poorest region, but Casar de Cáceres has serious skin in this game. It’s home to the Torta del Casar, a Protected Designation of Origin cheese that can only be made with milk from local Merino or Entrefina sheep. Every Christmas, Spaniards from all over the country clean out the supply. Muriel says local sheep milk production already can’t keep up with demand for the delicacy, and without new shepherds to replace the older generation as they retire, Torta del Casar will disappear.

In 2016, the cooperative founded what they call a “Shepherd’s School,” a five-month program combining classroom time and fieldwork to teach students everything about raising cows, goats, or sheep, from genetics and reproduction to cheesemaking. Some students are urbanites coming back to the land, while others come from farming families, says Enrique Izquierdo, the school’s coordinator and the grandson of a cattle farmer. With 12 to 15 full-time students a year, the school has graduated 57 people, and 70 percent of them have entered the field. Hoping to modernize their techniques, local shepherds and cattle ranchers have also been attending class.

Izquierdo thinks the future for traditional goatherds such as Hernández is in forming cooperatives that can share the burdens of physical labor and bureaucracy.

“Under the umbrella of a cooperative, we can cover the needs of our business while also being able to attend to our families,” Izquierdo says. That means more free time and a better quality of life. He adds, “We can’t be in the field all day long like our grandparents were.”

“They could be right,” says Hernández about the advantages of cooperatives. In the past few years, there was talk of creating a cheesemaking cooperative in the valley, and he considered joining, although the plans never materialized.

But, as you might expect from someone who insists on carrying out a 10th-century practice in the 21st century, Hernández ends the conversation by affirming, “But independently, it can work, too.”

When a goat gives birth, she produces an extra-thick milk known as calostro, full of nutrients for her kid. If you live in Jerte and are on good terms with Hernández, then, when one of his Veratas gives birth, he might offer to make you a culinary treat. In a pot over a low flame, Hernández mixes calostro with regular goat milk and sugar, stirring constantly until the mixture is about to boil, at which point he takes it off the stove.

Hernández echoes Izquierdo when thinking about his own legacy. His 16-year-old daughter, Cristina, loves the outdoors and joins him with the herd on weekends. But he doesn’t want her to take over the family business. It’s too grueling, he says. “I’d like her to have a better quality of life than I have.”

After a moment, realizing how he’s contradicted himself, he adds, “I’m here because I want to be. I carry it here in my blood, and that’s that. I don’t care if it’s 365 days a year. Because if you really do a thing with love … ” He doesn’t finish the sentence.

Left to cool, the calostro will thicken into a pudding-like consistency that can only be described as spiritual. In one bite, you’ll swear you can taste the entire valley: the aromatic cantueso, the blackberry brambles, the hard-earned nourishment of winter.

On a cold and snowy March day in 1938, Judy Garland took a train from Chicago to Minneapolis and set off on the three-hour drive to her birthplace: Grand Rapids, Minnesota. She was 16. The following year, The Wizard of Oz would make her famous as the girl with the red slippers, but she was already well-known as a child actress and singer. John Kelsch, the co-founder of the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, says that a crowd marveled as she stepped out of the car in a leopard-skin coat and hat. Some apparently asked, “Who is that?”

“It’s a swell state, Minnesota,” Garland said after her trip. “I’m proud it’s my home, and I know a few hundred thousand of us who feel the same way.”

Today, a glass case in the museum houses the very hat and scarf that Garland wore on that cold evening when she climbed out of the car. It’s displayed alongside an Andy Warhol screen print of Garland, props from The Wizard of Oz, dolls, and original photos of Garland and her three sisters. They’re collected in the wood-frame house where Garland was born in 1922, a structure that was built by a steam boat captain way back in the 1890s.

“In terms of American history, and the fact that The Wizard of Oz is one of the most watched movies of all time, this is as important to me as any President’s house,” Kelsch says, walking around the enchanted garden on the south side of the building. Passing cutouts of munchkins, and others of Dorothy and her companions strolling down the yellow brick road, Kelsch goes further: “Does anyone know who Grover Cleveland is? Would they want to visit his house?” (Not particularly, he says.) Garland’s childhood home remains an attraction, in part because so many children knew her as Dorothy. The wooden house even looks like the one that landed on the Wicked Witch of the West more than 80 years ago.

Judy Garland was born Frances Ethel Gumm in 1922. Her parents were vaudevillians who ran a theater, which provided an escape for the working-class population of this northern Minnesota town. Once, when she was very young, she sang at her father’s theater, Kelsch says. The song was “Jingle Bells,” and she sang it over and over, each time receiving a raucous applause. Her dad eventually had to come and cart her off the stage, according to Kelsch. In her later years, studio executives liked to play up Judy’s small town upbringing as a way to enhance her image as the wholesome girl next door—an image that helped her land landed her the role of Dorothy.

Kelsch has devoted half of his life to preserving Garland’s legacy in the town. In 1986, he graduated from New York University with a masters degree in museum studies, but he says he had no interest in the politics of a big museum. “I want to get things done,” he says, dressed in red flannel, jeans, and sneakers. Kelsch looks more like a carpenter than a museum’s executive director. Almost as if he doesn’t want to overshadow Judy’s legacy.

In 1989, Kelsch was working for the Itasca County Historical Society, maintaining a collection that included the history of the town’s logging industry. He says that the society had a few dusty scrapbooks that chronicled Garland’s four years in the town, but nothing substantial. (A precursor of the Judy Garland Museum, founded by Jackie Dingmann, had been set up in a former high school built from local stone.)

That’s when Kelsch was introduced to Jon Miner, a former Minnesota printing magnate who was interested in preserving Garland’s legacy. In 1991, Miner purchased Garland’s childhood home. He also bought the carriage that Dorothy and her companions rode through the Emerald City, along with one of the dresses she wore in the movie. “I paid $13,000 for a dress,” Miner says with a laugh. He claims that it’s now worth millions.

Shortly after he purchased the house, Miner entrusted Kelsch with the day-to-day operations of the museum. They’ve been partners ever since, and Miner says he’s invested millions in Garland’s legacy. He’s even been after the city council to change the slogan of the town from “It’s in Minnesota’s Nature” to “There’s no place like home,” he says, complete with an image of the ruby slippers. “Brainerd has Paul Bunyan,” Miner says. “We have Judy Garland.”

The road leading to Grand Rapids is no yellow brick road, but it is beautiful. Not in a 1940’s technicolor kind of way, but the kind of slow beauty reserved for those who endure the brutality of the state’s winters: sweeping views of lakes, fields of red and gold leaves. The two-lane road from Minneapolis hugs Lake Mille Lacs, which is known for wild rice and walleye. Winds whip the waters of the lake, tossing small boats about. Small bait shops are still doing a brisk business, and diners offer home cooked-food and charm.

It looked and felt quite different in Garland’s day. In the 1920s, Grand Rapids was still a rough and tumble logging town with lots of Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, and Germans. Many were farmers and lumberjacks well versed in hard, blue-collar work. During that time, Christmas was a tradition brought from back home, and many people spoke the languages their grandparents had spoken.

Judy Garland’s house used to be located near the town center, not far from the antique shops, variety stores, and Old Central School building that occupy the area today. But the house has moved three times over the years, and today it sits with an adjacent children’s museum on Pokegama Avenue, near some strip malls, a small hotel, and the occasional farmers market.

“Grand Rapids is no Emerald City, to be sure,” says Bill Convery, of the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul. “But Judy Garland visited Emerald City, and I think Grand Rapids is proud that they have someone who kind of touched that dream. And I think they have every reason to be proud of that.” He points out that for locals, Judy Garland is not only a historical figure, but also a symbol. “In many ways the Judy Garland Museum is about history, but it's also about our hopes and our dreams.”

At the same time, Convery isn’t sure how institutions like the museum will sustain themselves over time. “I wonder how people are going to remember Judy Garland,” he says. “We're getting to a time in our history where I think more and more people who went to Judy Garland movies as kids are passing away.” Future generations will have to discover her by looking back—several books about Garland have come out in recent years, and a biographical film called Judy, starring Renée Zellweger, comes out this month.

Not all the memories of Judy Garland are as shiny as the ruby slippers she wore in The Wizard of Oz. (The museum had one of the original pairs on loan, until the shoes were stolen in 2005; the museum replaced them with replicas that fans sent in, and the originals were recovered in 2018.) At the entrance to the museum, there’s a long description detailing Garland’s struggles with addiction, her relationship issues, and the challenges she experienced in her career.

Kelsch felt it was important for the museum to address those complexities at the very beginning. “We didn’t want to hide anything,” he said. The story of Garland’s untimely death, to an accidental overdose in London at the age of 47, still casts a shadow over many stories of her life. End of the Rainbow, a 2008 play that has been staged on Broadway and on West End in London, is set during the difficult months before her death.

But Kelsch and his fellow fans don’t remember her that way. He still remembers when he heard one of Garland’s recordings, on a cassette tape in his hometown of Bismarck, North Dakota. “I just couldn’t believe anyone could sing like that,” he says. He remembers that his mother asked him, “Are you sure you want to spend your life in a small town?” His answer was yes.

Maintaining the museum, for him, is a labor of love. “I do everything,” he said. “I raise the money. I help build the exhibits and I keep the lights on.” Garland seemed to remember Grand Rapids as the place she lived before her life began to be corrupted by show business. Her time under contract at MGM Studios was often brutal. The hours were long, and studio executives ragged on her for not being pretty enough, not being thin enough. In a way, life in Grand Rapids must have represented a place she could hold on to, the place where she first began to dream of the success she ultimately achieved.

“Basically, I am still Judy Garland,” she wrote to a fan in 1958. “A plain American girl from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, who’s had a lot of good breaks, a few tough breaks, and who loves you with all her heart for your kindness in understanding that I am nothing more, nothing less.”

There is history as it was, and history as we wish it could be. The Judy Garland Museum contains a bit of both. Judy Garland was an actress, a singer, a star—and, like the Wizard of Oz, she was a maker of myths. Garland’s evening gowns, her makeup kit, the gifts given to her by other stars like Frank Sinatra—all these items invite visitors to participate in that same myth-making. In her childhood home, even Grand Rapids can start to feel like the poppy fields of Oz.